February 8, 20179 yr I wouldn't use the disks in an array in the meantime, there are simply way too many potential situations that can cause writes to them... If you need access to the data while maintaining the hope of rebuilding one of the failed drives, make sure any access to the disks is 100% read-only. If I understand, if even 1 byte of data is written the I can forget using the parity drive to recover in the future? Is there a way to start the array in Read-Only mode? If even 1 byte of data is written then it would compromise any rebuild, but people have mostly recovered from much worse. Whether or not that one byte would actually corrupt a file is uncertain. It sounds as if you understand parity pretty well since the scenarios you propose are somewhat reasonable. I don't think there is any way to start the array read-only. It would be possible to mount individual drives read-only from the command line. I tend to think of writes outside the array to be like bullets being shot through your ability to reconstruct data. The more writing, the more and larger the bullet holes.
February 8, 20179 yr Community Expert Is there then a better way to access my data while I wait for the PCBs to sent? I mean without mounting disk individually in read-only from the cli? Thanks Since you say you don't have backups, maybe this is a good time to make some. Then you could access the backups to get your data. I don't know how safe one of those disk-cloning toasters is but I would assume they wouldn't write to the source disk. Then you could make an array from the backup disks. Of course, you would have to buy some disks.
February 8, 20179 yr Author Actually a very good idea, thanks. Although I couldn't afford to back up everything as there's just too much but I could take the essentials. Other than building another array, would you have any recommendation on accessing the data? I have a desktop PC that I could add an expansion card to, maybe dual boot with a Linux distribution to access the data?
February 8, 20179 yr Community Expert Actually a very good idea, thanks. Although I couldn't afford to back up everything as there's just too much but I could take the essentials. Other than building another array, would you have any recommendation on accessing the data? I have a desktop PC that I could add an expansion card to, maybe dual boot with a Linux distribution to access the data? Linux would be the easiest way to access the filesystems used by unRAID.
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