Hi everyone. I'm pretty sure I already know the answer to this one, but I thought it best to get another opinion, particularly from someone which much more knowledge than me!
I have a RAID5 array with 3x 4TB HDDs (so 8TB of storage). About a month ago one of the drives failed. The only error I could see in SMART was that the "Current Pending Sector Count" was 7. So I powered down the system, physically disconnected the failed drive and restarted. The RAID array showed as "degraded" (obviously, because it was missing a drive), but I was still able to use the RAID drive. I realise that I was being risky by still using the drive in this fashion, but I had some files on it that needed to be accessed by other users, so didn't really have the luxury of leaving it completely offline. I had ordered a new HDD and had hoped that it would arrive quickly and I could just swap out the dead drive and then rebuilt the RAID array with no issues.
Anyway, while my new HDD was on its way, a second of the drives failed. This time with a "Current Pending Sector Count" of only 1.
Now, obviously with two failed drives, a RAID5 array is broken, but I'm wondering how "dead" the two drives actually are? Like, is it still possible to recover any data from them? The "Current Pending Sector Count" values seem to be quite low. The first disk that failed has a "bad" health status in Crystal Disk but the second failed disk is only showing as "warning", which makes me think it might still be potentially recoverable?
Fortunately, I did do a complete back-up only a fortnight before the second disk failure, so worst case is that I lose 2 weeks of data, but I would obviously much rather recover as much as possible before resorting to that (I will incidentally be replacing all of the drives with a single 10TB shortly).
Any advice that can be provided would be greatly appreciated and please ask any questions that you might have that could narrow down my options.
I have a RAID5 array with 3x 4TB HDDs (so 8TB of storage). About a month ago one of the drives failed. The only error I could see in SMART was that the "Current Pending Sector Count" was 7. So I powered down the system, physically disconnected the failed drive and restarted. The RAID array showed as "degraded" (obviously, because it was missing a drive), but I was still able to use the RAID drive. I realise that I was being risky by still using the drive in this fashion, but I had some files on it that needed to be accessed by other users, so didn't really have the luxury of leaving it completely offline. I had ordered a new HDD and had hoped that it would arrive quickly and I could just swap out the dead drive and then rebuilt the RAID array with no issues.
Anyway, while my new HDD was on its way, a second of the drives failed. This time with a "Current Pending Sector Count" of only 1.
Now, obviously with two failed drives, a RAID5 array is broken, but I'm wondering how "dead" the two drives actually are? Like, is it still possible to recover any data from them? The "Current Pending Sector Count" values seem to be quite low. The first disk that failed has a "bad" health status in Crystal Disk but the second failed disk is only showing as "warning", which makes me think it might still be potentially recoverable?
Fortunately, I did do a complete back-up only a fortnight before the second disk failure, so worst case is that I lose 2 weeks of data, but I would obviously much rather recover as much as possible before resorting to that (I will incidentally be replacing all of the drives with a single 10TB shortly).
Any advice that can be provided would be greatly appreciated and please ask any questions that you might have that could narrow down my options.