Replacing a Seagate NAS 220 that died

[Jim Van Keulen]

Hi, I've been using a Seagate NAS 220 with 2, 2TB drives mirrored for several years. About a month ago, it disappeared from the network. I tried to re-start it and it will not boot. I believe the drives themselves are still good, so I bought a used 220 via eBay and it arrived yesterday. My plan was to put my drives into that box but I have a concern. I don't know how the NAS stores configuration information. If everything is on the disk, then I should be good, but if it is in flash memory, then I run the risk of the NAS seeing the drives as new and creating all new partitions, potentially damaging my data. Does anyone know if putting the drives into the working box is safe? My alternative is to put only one drive in. They were mirrored, so all of the data should be on each drive. At least then, I only risk losing one of them.
Thank you,
Jim

 

[L&LD]

In your case, I would use a spare drive and make sure the firmware is identical to what your NAS was running. Then I would be tempted to put one (or both) drives in the replacement NAS and hopefully see it on the network.

But before that? I would be using an external enclosure or dock to copy the data to another USB drive instead (and I would be doing so once for each mirrored drive too).

 

[sfx2000]

good lesson learned perhaps - keep a backup of the NAS as well as other devices on the LAN

 

[RMerlin]

QNAP allow you to easily migrate to many different QNAP models just by plugging your old disks in. QNAP has a compatibility matrix for such migrations.

For the OP, my advice would be to check with Seagate if their product support such a migration.

 

[Jim Van Keulen]

Hi all,
Thanks for the quick responses. Since the new NAS came with two working 1TB drives, I decided to move those drives to the NAS that I thought had failed. It turns out the NAS is fine, and the drives have failed. It looks like I will need to take them to DataTech Labs to have the data recovered. FYI - I did hear from Seagate support on their Facebook page and they told me that moving drives from one NAS to another should be successful as long as the firmware is at the same level.

 

[Samir]

Wow, two mirrored drives failed simultaneously? Was there something traumatic (power, shock, etc) that would cause both to fail like that?

This is why I want to see a raid 1.3 spec developed to use three drives in mirrored configuration. Or better yet raid 1.n where you can infinitely scale it. Because the only backup to the current raid 1, is to mirror them, which is ...raid 1.

 

[RMerlin]

Do Seagate offer any email notification in case of disk failure? If not, that's one big reason not to use their product IMHO. Otherwise, disks can fail one after the other without you ever noticing.

I had only one customer using a Seagate NAS. They were having frequent performance and stability issues, all resolved by moving to a QNAP. LAN throughput nearly tripled then. The Seagate was kept as a backup target, and it completely died maybe 6 months after I had migrated the customer to the QNAP. That was a close one...

 

[sfx2000]

I had only one customer using a Seagate NAS. They were having frequent performance and stability issues, all resolved by moving to a QNAP. LAN throughput nearly tripled then. The Seagate was kept as a backup target, and it completely died maybe 6 months after I had migrated the customer to the QNAP. That was a close one...

No doubt - good example of why including a NAS in the overall backup plan is so very important...

Wonder if the reduced performance was due to the drives having trouble (e.g. soft-fail, which can occur on spinning drives)

 

[RMerlin]

No doubt - good example of why including a NAS in the overall backup plan is so very important...

Wonder if the reduced performance was due to the drives having trouble (e.g. soft-fail, which can occur on spinning drives)

There were a number of different problems on that customer's LAN (they had stopped working with me about 6 years ago, and came back to me two years ago to fix what the competitor did with their LAN during that time...). The overall NAS performance wasn't great to begin with, I think we were pushing around 400 Mbps from it, while the QNAP was getting closer to 900 Mbps (I forgot the exact number). They also had to frequently reboot it as it would stop working. Finally, they also had random packet losses on the entire LAN caused by... a defective NIC in one of their PCs. (that one was a dozy to troubleshoot, took me the whole afternoon).

Should I mention that they went with that other IT guy at the time for pricing reasons?

 

[Jim Van Keulen]

Wow, two mirrored drives failed simultaneously? Was there something traumatic (power, shock, etc) that would cause both to fail like that?

This is why I want to see a raid 1.3 spec developed to use three drives in mirrored configuration. Or better yet raid 1.n where you can infinitely scale it. Because the only backup to the current raid 1, is to mirror them, which is ...raid 1.

I would guess that one drive failed and, for some reason, I didn't get the email. The last time a drive failed in the unit, I did get the email and I replaced the drive. So, I was unknowingly using the drive with only one of the drives functional, until that one failed, and here I am. Because of this scenario, I need to send both drives in for recovery. One of them will have recent data and the other may not have data for the last several months.
Thanks again