hewisond

Well, that drive I repaired finally gave up the ghost and breathed it's last breath last night - RIP...

So, my dilemma, My RAID 5 array is made of up 4 x 2TB Green caviar disks, I forget why I chose them but, chose them i did.  And they arent being made any more dammit. 

Given the server's been working perfectly for about a year now, I havent been keeping up to date with anything tech related, so I had no idea what was on offer these days..

Anyway, i came across the new WD Red drives which are designed for Home / SOHO NAS / RAID setups.. any system that is on 24/7 with multiple drives.. They say they're more stable, cooler, faster, more robust and Red... Only $AUD120 so not too bad price wise...

Anyway it's in now and rebuilding nicely.  If it stays nice and stable, I'll swap them all out to Reds over time.. 

We all knew that this drive's days were numbered, but that HDD regenerator software worked a treat and gave me the breathing space i needed.. highly recommended. 

Bloody hell, imagine if you filled that up - and had a drive failure! lol  That would suck...

When are the 5TB drives due out???? 

Yes its critical - however there's no critical data on the array, only movies and tv.

All other data is backed up to two local disks being 1 x SBS backup and 1 x Cloudberry backup to a different internal disk.  I also have a Cloudberry online backup to an S3 account.  So there's three separate backups in total.

I actually hadn't thought of the larger drives, I wasn't even aware that they'd released 4 TB drives yet! lol  I'll have a closer look now cheers

You're dead right pcdoc - its only back in to maintain performance over the next week or so.  If it fails again, the array will only degrade so I'm not too worried about losing data in the short term.

I have already put an RMA request into WD, although that was 3 days ago and I still haven't heard back... 

The drive that is 4mb too small, it's otherwise fine so I will use that as a stand alone in the server (thats what it used to be anyway), or maybe a new backup drive come to think of it.

Regardless of RMA's, I will buy a new drive to replace the dodgy one next week.

I'm self employed and have been pretty sick this year (im all good now) so money is very scarce at the moment.. however, assuming one of my clients pays on time, I'll be flush again next week.. I may even by a new server all together - right now I have a 4 x 2tb array, 1 x 2tb (the shrunk disk)  and 2 x 1.5 tb stand alone disks... and a system disk. Oh and the backup disk is on a USB3 external...

My array is almost full  So I'd love to make that a 6 x 2tb raid 5, or maybe raid 6 - not sure yet.. Unfortunately i cant fit any more disks in to the current server.   I'd buy a new box and swap it all into it, but then I have no idea how to transfer all that data over - I'd need to have double the disks i already have.. hence i may upgrade to a whole new system and use the old box as a desktop or something.

I was thinking of going for one of these: http://www.xcase.co....case-305-3u.htm

I have no idea how to configure the thing yet, I guess i better start thinking about it lol..  If you don't mind, when the time comes, i'd love to have a chat to you about if thats possible?

Anyway, thank you all for your help!