I have an unRaid array with 8 500G PATA drives, and 6 SATA drives.  I just had a 500G PATA drive fail, and these apparently are getting harder to find.  I will be building a new UNRAID tower soon with all SATA, but need to get this array stable first.

 

Anyone know of any good sources for a 500G PATA drive?  I currently have Seagate ST3500630A and ST3500641A.

 

Thanks!

One option is to use the server in "degraded" mode where it's simulating the failed drive.

 

While it's in that mode, copy everything off the failed drive (say at \\tower\disk3) perhaps over the LAN to another drive.

 

Then removed the failed drive and do a "New Config" -- creating a "new" array without the failed drive.

 

That's what I did when I had a 750GB PATA drive fail. I wasn't going to be able to replace it.

I can't remember if I was able to do a Parity Check to check all the other drives before doing the New Config.

 

That said, where are you? If you are in the UK, I have plenty of 500GB IDE drives I would like to get rid of!

You could also try to source a PATA to SATA interface converter. That way you can purchase or use a more modern drive while keeping the array alive for the time being.

 

I would suggest as neilt0 did, rsync or copy over the simulated/virtualized drive to some spare somewhere as soon as you can.

 

maybe even attach a USB drive temporarily.

 

Thanks for the suggestions.  Unfortunately I am in the US (Florida).

Can't unRAID rebuild PATA onto SATA? If so then I assume you have ruled that out because of other factors you don't mention such as no SATA slots, don't have any new SATA drives as small as your parity, or some other scenario.

 

In any case, Google 500GB IDE turns up a lot of results and not all are out of stock, but they won't be as cheap as SATA of similar capacity.

Out of slots.....

 

 

Thanks for the suggestions.  Unfortunately I am in the US (Florida).

 

If only you had posted this ~ a week ago, I just took a flight from London to Florida, although, I'm not too sure how much I'd trust you guys with my address, no offence 

I happen to have a bunch of Sata to Pata controller boards lying around (5 or 6). I may even have an extra Pata 500GB drive too. If you want to continue using the system you could use the controllers on newer Sata drives and unraid would think they were IDE. It would slow the drive down of course but you could continue to use the system. Let me know if your interested.