I have a QNAP TS-209 Nas device. It’s a Linux based appliance with 2 hot swap drives.
It has now died by the looks of it, QNAP support has been utterly useless to say the least but I have pretty much resolved to just replacing this unit even if they are able to resurrect it. The problem with the 1xx and 2xx range of QNAP is that its some weird CPU architecture and to enable huge files on them they had to patch the ext3 file system.
The end result is that while the devices are advertised as being ext3 they are in-fact a patched ext3 and you cannot just mount them in a Linux machine. They have also now stopped selling this series of machine so should yours ever die you are just plainly out of luck. QNAP have made a live cd available that’s similarly patched so you should have some hope if you are really in trouble.
In my case the device seem to have also totally corrupted the drives when it died so even in the Live CD scenario both are dead. It seems the SATA interface has gone rather than the disks, the moment I put a disk in it seems the CPU is totally kept busy dealing with blocking I/O requests, out of a 1000 pings about 20 will get replies – and those will be 30 second response times.
This brings me to several points:
- Everyone knows this (right?) but RAID is not a form of backup, it’s most probably that if one drive in a RAID array gets it’s data corrupted the others will suffer too. It simply protects you against hardware failure on a single drive.
- You should make backups regularly, as it turns out I made a backup just 12 days before it died so every file that was on the NAS is safe.
I’ve now spent the last 2 or so days duplicating my backups so I am redundantly covered while I look for a replacement. I’d have liked to not buy another QNAP but it’s really unfortunate that they do seem to have the best range of products in this space. All the vendors seem to have stopped selling 2 drive units so I am down to getting a 4 drive QNAP TS-439 now, this will set me back almost GBP900 but will give me 2TB of mirrored space, apple Time Machine backups for all my macs etc, pricey but important given that this is all my photos and music.
In the same week it seems my Apple iMac 24 inch has had similar problems. It isn’t booting, it seems a similar problem has afflicted it, I am not getting the usual I/O errors I saw on other macs when their drives died instead it’s other I/O timeouts that suggest more it’s the controller and not the drives. Thankfully I have Apple Care so it’s in for a free fixup. I do not have backups of this machine – that’s by design – since I keep all my data on servers on the internet and those are backed up off-site nightly. My desktops tend to be disposable and simply terminals to online data even browser bookmarks are stored online. The only thing lost on this machine would be chat logs and browser history, nothing else. I need to make some kind of plan with chat logs as those do tend to be more and more important these days.
So to sum up, even if you have multi redundancy in your drives in a NAS you must still do your backups, it’s easy with QNAPs to even do it off-site as you can rsync to a remote location or even sync to Amazon S3. Of course they also have USB ports so you can place files on an external drive.
