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Removing hard disk from a JBOD Array (no SHR or RAID)


Soulstorm

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Hey guys, i have a bunch of disks in my Xpenology server, configured in a JBOD array, with no RAID or SHR RAID, just a pool of disks. What would happen if remove one of them (say, one of the 500GB ones, since i need it for another computer), what data would be still on it? i know Synology copies the OS installation on each drive, but how does it manage the data, is each drive filled in an order or something (i have an Ubuntu VM ready so i can recover the data from the removed HDD after i remove it, just curious what i`m going to find).

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while "Technically" the data is spread between the disks, from what I understand it would take a pretty sophisticated recovery process and some intimate knowledge of ext3/4 file system structure to try to recreate data out of a "broken" JBOD. AFAIK you're either gonna have to get a different hard drive for that other computer.. or... backup your JBOD, break it, pull the drive out of it, recreate it with one fewer drive and then put whatever data you can fit back on.... JBOD is basically a terrible system for almost every setup I can think of

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As wvh3 points out, pull your data off the jbod first then break it. If you break the jbod before pulling your data you will lose your data.

 

Go with SHR next time around to give you some type of resiliency.

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FWIW i've recovered data from a broken JBOD before, however I do not recall the application I used to do it. Had to try a few different apps to finally find one that didn't care that it was technically a broken 'raid' and would just pull the data.

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Yup, seems you guys were right. Removing a drive from the array trashes the entire volume, even the data that is still on the left-over drives still in the server is not accesible anymore. I was hoping that it would act like DrivePool under Windows Server 2012, where you can still access the data on the drives still left in the array, but it seems not. Yup, JBOD on Synology seems like a bad ideea, so i bought another 2TB drive, saved as much data as i could on it and on another external drive, deleted the volume, and created a SHR array with 1 parity drive, for peace of mind.

 

Thanks a lot guys.

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