G Speed Q Drive Issue

G-Technology G-SPEED & G-SAFE
1

Hey,

So I’ve got an older model G Speed Q 4 TB drive (USB 2.0, FW800 and Esata) that was striped at RAID 5 that took a tumble and now is not working and I’ve had a tough time diagnosing the problem.

When it was first powered back up the notification lights for each drive showed there were no issues however the red warning LED on the casing would flash and not stop. The drive would not mount or be seen by a disk recovery software like disk warrior.

I have an second identical G Speed Q drive also 4TB that I figured could help solve the issue. I swapped out the 4 drives from the unit that fell and placed them into the functional unit - the red warning LED would also not go off on the 2nd casing for the drives either. I then placed the 4 drives that were in the functional casing into the one that fell and it started up and worked perfectly.

I believe that one or more of the drives from the unit that fell are causing the unit to not behave normally even though the status LEDs on the drives are reading as normal. My question is how should I go about figuring out which drive(s) are at fault? I contemplated getting a single replacement drive and swapping out each drive to see which one is faulty but if there is more than one, this method won’t help.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

2

Hello,

With the way the Q was designed, if the drive isn’t showing a full failure LED then the only way to test it is the method you had planned. It would need to be a single drive attempt. But if it is not mounting on the computer then it is likely more than 1 or all 4 drives has failed. If it was just 1 drive then it would continue to the mount since it is in RAID5.

3

Thanks for the quick reply. My last question would be if I wanted to swap out all of the drives in this unit, would there be any size limitations on what I could replace them with? I also have a 12TB G Speed Q with 4 3TB drives that I attempted to test the unit with and was unable to have the red LED light go off.

4

It is possible the enclosure itself was damaged in the drop, that’s a lot of weight to be rolled around. But to answer the question there shouldn’t be any limitations. That last industry standard limitation of hard drives was 2TB. Once you can support greater than 2TB you theoretically have no limit. But we haven’t tested all capacities in the older versions of the Q.