Degraded Disk in SS 4 TB with RAID 5

Community Archives WD ShareSpace
1

Hi

There has probably have been tons of questions of what to do with a “Degraded Disk”.

I have delicate data on my disk and do not wish to loose it therefore bear with me and please try your best to give me some advice.

One disk have gone into degraded mode. And I use RAID 5.

Question 1: Is my data safe so far?

Question 2: What would be my first move?

* Put the disk in my desktop Win 7

* Scan the disk with CHKDSK on Win 7

* Try to reformat it on my Win7 PC

* Stick it back into SS and hope for the best that it will resync?

OR

Should I just return the disk to the store where I bought it and hope I get a disk with me back home. Or do they want to try to fix a HDD?

How would you do this?

Cheers,

Z94

2

First advice: If your data is so “delicate” then make yourself responsible to back it up instead of leaving it on a single device expecting for it not to fail any time soon, RAID just adds fault tolerance for drive failure, it’s not a backup.

1- only if one drive is bad, if 2 drives or the controller are bad then the data is gone.

2- Windows 7 won’t see a SS drive because it’s formatted as EXT3, a Linux file system not supported by Windows.

Your chance is to take each drive out one at a time, run WD’s DLG to run a FULL TEST on each drive until you find the one that’s bad, and then zero out that drive with DLG. If all drives are good on the test then zero any random drive, just remember to put the drives in the exact same slot they were.