Drive order. What happens if they get mixed up?

[Phone Guy]

So, what if someone took drives out of an 8 bay setup, and reinstalled them in the wrong order. Is that something that DSM can repair or is the data lost?

 

[Rusty]

Back in the day that was an issue, but not anymore (as long the drives are ofc from the same array). You might get some problems registered in the Storage Manager about the needed fix on the systems partition, but that will be a simple click and a few second fix.

Data and the volume(s) should be intact and fine.

 

[Telos]

Drive order is an issue with hardware RAID. Synology uses software RAID. The info is stored on the drives. Slot location is meaningless.

 

[Phone Guy]

Just to update, I had an issue, restarting kept giving me an issue saying pool was corrupt,blah blah blah. It didn't like them all in on power up... said many had system partition issues.

So I pulled the drives and inserted them 1 by 1, which it liked no partition errors and each registered as healthy, except 1 (drive 3) said crashed - though it did say healthy but crashed, even ran a smart test with no errors, but would not repair. I had to disconnect 3 from the pool from the drop down menu, and reinstall it, which formatted it after warning me it would do so, and it started to rebuild the raid pool...its still going, it rebuilt in a few hours, now its data scrubbing.... but it shows everything as good.

#3 showed healthy, but crashed..? I know it all started because they all got put in and powered on, in a jumbled order or at least not the original slot order. But at least its fixing it with no data loss... I would have hated to re-backup all that, it took 3-4 days last time I think?

Moral to this story for anyone reading in the future, try inserting them 1 at a time while the unit is on, and hopefully it will all come back to life.

Thanks to those who replied.

 

[Rusty]

Moral to this story for anyone reading in the future, try inserting them 1 at a time while the unit is on, and hopefully it will all come back to life.

Ofc this can only be implemented on devices that support "hot swap", and not all models do.