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Not sure what to make of this behaviour, but here goes.

I have 3 Seagate 4 T drives in a windows 2012 r2 server in a software raid 5. Recently, I logged onto the server to see that 2 disks (specifically the disks in sata slot 1 and 2) were deactivated. I reactivated the drives, let the array sync, then ran all the tests in seatools which came up with no issues.

Just logged in today and found the same 2 drives are deactivated again....

I have begun resyncing, but I'm wondering if there are any better diagnostics to run to see if I need to replace the drives now. Long term I'm planning to buy a nas and move the data to it instead of the windows server, but I wasn't planning to do that for a few months.

Stephan
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  • A raid5 with 2 dead/deactivated drives should be offline (if not totally toasted). What do you mean with "deactivated"? Was the volume online or offline? – shodanshok Jun 20 '20 at 20:46
  • The volume was online, however the disks were listed as deactivated. It's as simple as right click on the disk and then reactivate the disk. Currently the volume is resynching. I tried finding an example screenshot on line, but none of the errors look like mine. If it happens again I'll take screenshots. – Stephan Jun 20 '20 at 21:04
  • Error looks similar to this, where it says failed redundancy and you can reactivate disk https://www.buffalotech.com/images/Support_images/WSS_2008_recovery/10c.png – Stephan Jun 20 '20 at 21:23
  • This isn't answer for your question but I would encourage you to move away from software RAID. I've never seen any good come of it and it usually fails in strange and random ways like this. – duct_tape_coder Jun 22 '20 at 22:20
  • Sometimes when a disk is offline, you can hover over it and it'll tell you why it went offline (due to system policy usually). Check your Windows Event Log (system and application) for any events that may explain why it went offline. There are a fair number of cmdlets in powershell that can also get details about disks, which may provide some information about why a disk is the way it is. – duct_tape_coder Jun 22 '20 at 22:22
  • @duct_tape_coder I've never had issues like this with linux mdadm, only happening on Windows. What's frustrating is that the disks are all reporting normal. I had a disk go offline in this array 3 years ago, and the disk did have a problem and I replaced it. These disks keep testing fine. – Stephan Jun 22 '20 at 22:41
  • I've only experimented with windows software RAID it has always gone bad for me. Nothing in the logs? – duct_tape_coder Jun 22 '20 at 22:46
  • My largest complaint is it's inflexibility. When I wanted a larger raid array, I cant just replace the drives 1 by 1 and resync the data, then grow the filesystem. I had to create a whole new array with larger drives. It's why I'm going to get a NAS, but that's just a different software raid on a lightweight linux kernel. – Stephan Jun 22 '20 at 22:49
  • So things finally came to a head. Drive slot 1 is showing that there are reallocated sectors, so I've already backed up all the data to other drives. I'm buying a new synology and new drives to populate it. Also, since others didn't know what it looked like, here is an example of the errors it was showing. https://imgur.com/a/uS0cKtt – Stephan Jul 22 '20 at 21:33

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