As for any server based on the RAID technology, when an HDD/SSD drive failure occurs, it needs to be replaced by a new drive as soon as possible.
However when it does happen, there is no immediate emergency and it is important to carefully think over ones action as manipulating a degraded raid set is not risk free.
Therefore if you are not confident, it’s better worth waiting for our team support in order to avoid delicate situations or data loss in the worst case scenario.
Unless a drive really fails by itself, please also consider contacting our team before replacing a drive.
When a drive fails, the raid card will keep emitting an alarm sound, the way to turn it off is explained in that topic.
The first step consists in identifying the problematic drive, which can be achieved by opening the Areca web interface form the DDP web GUI.
If a DDP contains multiple raid cards, multiple entries will be displayed in the web GUI “Areca” page.
As you might not know which raid card contains a problematic drive, you can simply open each card interface in different tabs and check from the logs which one contains the drive.
Once you know the drive number, you can go to the “Identify Drive” page just under the “Physical Drives” menu and physically identify the drive by selecting it from the list as shown below:
Once you click the “Submit” button, the drive led will keep blinking until you quit the page on your web browser. That way, it gives you time to check on the DDP chassis which drive is blinking. You can then just take it out and after putting a new drive in the caddie, insert it straight away into the DDP.
Please do not power off the DDP when replacing the drive as such manipulations should be done while the DDP is still on. The reason is that the raid card is supposed to detect all drives changes and handle them, replacing drives when the DDP is off will disturb that mechanism and might lead to problems.
After replacing the drive, a data rebuild process will automatically start and usually take about 24 hours to complete.
As this process relies on the raid set remaining drives for reconstructing the data, you might notice a slight performance drop-down while using the DDP until the rebuilding eventually completes.
If your DDP is under warranty, our team will send you a new spare drive once we receive the failed one.