Hello, could anyone advise? this morning one of my drives showed some errors, I was rooting around on the forum for advice and when I came back to it it has now dissapeared completely, it shows "unassigned" in the identification field and "Not installed" with a red dot on the device column.

 

Is this a straight up the drive has died? i have a parity drive so would my next step be to just replace this drive with a fresh one?

 

Thanks

Power cycle the server, disk will still be red balled but if present post a SMART report, disk dropping offline could be a bad disk or a bad cable, SMART info can help diagnose.

Thanks for your reply, i'm unable to get the identifier though as it shows as "not installed"?

Check cables, but if disk does not show up after power cycle it's probably dead.

I figured as much, it's been going a long time so not that surprising - with regards to getting the parity drive to take its space, will it just do that automatically or do i need to take the array offline and re-assign the drive?

Parity drive won’t take its place, it will together with all other disks emulate the failed disk contents, for this you just have to start the array with the failed disk missing/unassigned.

 

Replace that disk asap because you’ll be unprotected in case of another disk failure.

 

Awesome will do, so effectively (just for my understanding) the parity drive picks up the slack but i'm running "unprotected" now until i replace the failed drive?

 

Thanks very much for your help / advice.

Yes, the failed disk is created by reading from parity together with all other data disks, if another data disk fails you won’t be able to rebuild either, you can lose data from both, unless the disks are not completely dead and in that case some/all data can be recovered.