2025-02-01

Happy to report that everything finally seems to be back to working as usual. Long story short: I put the new disk in, let the array rebuild, scrubbed the data, and then the scary stuff started: inventorizing the damage. Well, it's quite bad, but I've been lucky to not suffer any irreversible data-loss. It took a series of updates of all the software, and a few "clean" installs to get all the different services back working. The library was hit hardest: the database software was completely unusable. Luckily I was able to reinstall and use the existing database file (this saved me about a fortnight of work).

Sadly, the whole thing cost me an almost brand new hard drive. If you read the previous updates, you will have seen my short explanation about CMR/SMR hard drives. Using my cold spare SMR hard drive, which had fewer than 5000 hours and perfect S.M.A.R.T.-statistics before, in the array for about three days destroyed it. The S.M.A.R.T.-data now show an increasing number of reallocated and bad secort. This is pretty bad, firstly because it was a pretty much new, 4TB, high-quality, industrial drive. Secondly, I no longer have a cold spare, nor can I use it reliably to make backups. So It's pretty much a useless brick now.

As always, I'm still in need of extra drives. So, as I requested before, if you have a spare drive (512e, CMR, and a minimum of 4TB (at least 6TB would now be better, though)) which you would be willing to part with for a fair price/trade, please let me know.