After beeing unable to login to our DX400 anymore we decided to do a recover. It seems to work, but is it really ok that it takes more than two days if there are 4 3GB drives inside?
Welcome to the Community.
A 4-drive 12TB (9TB) RAID 5 array can indeed take a very long time to rebuild. You can contact WD’s Technical Support for additional information related to the expected rebuild time and precaution measures. You can do so either by phone or email.
To Contact WD for Technical Support
http://support.wdc.com/contact/index.asp?lang=en
Support by Country
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Slow don’t even begin to describe it, glacial is way more like it, and, as for the “degraded performance” part in the docs while rebuilding, it is basically unusable. I have a 16TB system that failed a drive at between 6 and 9 months of installation, so much for the 1 million hour MTBF of interprise drives. Not that it is really a big issue in and of itself WD will repalce it, but my ignorance of raid 5 rebuild times in the DX4000, does leave a rather bad taste in my mouth just now. I am at 48 hours into the rebuild and just a wee bit over 36% done.
I am sure glad my photography business does not hinge on this boxes availability, that is for sure!
Live and learn I guess.
This is one of the many design issues of this unit. There are unfortunately others which are also qute annoying for a serious usage of the unit (I am experiencing now the loss of days with the internal clock when you switch off and switch on the unit)
We got smart - when our new drive arrived we put it in hot.
We also knew we had good backup of the device 1st.
So our device is live while the multi-day rebuild is running.
We knew if we listened to WD and shut the unit down and put the new drive in, we’d wait days before the unit was running and we need constant access to it
FYI - we have this box in a rack at our ISP next to our web/email servers and house all LIVE email data and websites on it, works great for this purpose!!
We were very nervous about the long rebuild so we backed up all data onto WD external single-drive box (MyBook), we only had about 1 tb to backup so not bad. Took 2 days to run the backups, then we put the new drive in hot.
Here is a small update from the swaps of Florida. My DX4000 took a bit over 4 days to rebuild including a reboot or two, and nearly everything works just fine, lucky me. In fact all my networked computers have backed up perfectly for three weeks now with no failures at all, I always had periodic failure or incompletes. My only problem now is that in Dashboard, the system health monitor is broken, for system temp, power supplies, and cooling fans. It sees the disks and says they are healthy but not much else. I am seeing the WD Enclosure Provider Service terminated unexpectedly in event viewer every few minutes. I haven’t figured that one out yet and I don’t understand why an array rebuild would break those functions, but there you go.
When such issues (quite frequent for this DX4000 units at least for my experience) occur the only solution is to perform a complete re-install of Windows Server 2008 R2 without deleting data. This is of course an activity which takes some hours to spend for IT maintainance and you also have to afford 2 or 3 days (minimum) of server downtime.
I have a DX4000 16TB (12TB actual capacity), 6 TB space in use.
After disk failure, I put in a new disk, rebuild is still not finished after 9 days.
Is this still within the “extremely slow” rebuild times that are to be exspected ?
I never had experiences with 16 Tb rebuilds, with 8 Tb I had recovery times of a few days. Perhaps you should wait a few days more before giving up. For sure Gramps will have better advices (e.g. investigation of some log files)
