I have read that the advantage of unRAID over RAID5 is that you can recover the data from the remaining good data drives even after a 2 drive failure.  If I have a parity drive and 4 data drives and 2 of the data drives fail, how exactly do I get to the data on the remaining good data drives?  I have searched for an answer to this without success and apologize if this has been answered and I just couldn't find it.

 

Thanks

You can remove the good drives and mount them in another system, or you can reconfigure your array to remove the two failed drives, and restart the array.

 

And if the lost data was critical, send the two failed drives to a data recovery service, and they can usually get 99% of it back.

Thank you for the quick reply.  By mount them in another system, do you mean they can be mounted to a linux system such as centos or ubuntu?

Any linux system, and any windows system with Reiser file system support.

Or leave them where they are, and use almost any Linux based Live CD, it's a standard ReiserFS v3 file system.  See also this FAQ entry, http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ#How_do_I_recover_data_from_an_unRAID_disk.3F.

...erm why not just leave the ok drives where they are and keep using them like every day?

 

I don't get why you have to do something to the NON failed drives.

 

If 2 data drives fail in unRAID, except the rebuild that you should do (when you have removed the failed drives), you keep working as every day with the remaining drives (and either use disk shares or the user shares that are on the remaining drives)

 

If one of the two failed drives is parity, sure you have to replace it with another, because else you WILL keep working (and have lost data from ONE disk) but you will be unprotected against further failures (until you replace that parity drive and rebuild).

 

Nothing changes - you don't have to do anything on the ok drives.