I recently spent 3 weeks in Ireland with my wife Wendy and our son Nate. This involves driving from the south coast of Dorset up to Scotland and then getting a ferry over to Belfast before travelling west to the Republic. While driving I got a slack notification that one of my SSD’s in my Synology DS918+ was in a bad way. (You do have notifications set up right? ) The timing could not have been worse. Now for years anyone that I have talked to at VMUG’s around data protection etc, I have advocating never using RAID 5. The reasons for this are well known. But when it’s your homelab and your wallet is in the line corners sometimes need to be cut.

When I got to Ireland I logged into the Synology it was pretty obvious it wasn’t happy

and it had pages and pages like this….

I had 3 SDD’s in this particular array all from around the same time. Out of curiosity, I checked how old they were. The drive that failed had a power-on-hours count of 49599 hours (5.6 Years) It had more than served its purpose so some replacements were ordered for when I was back in Poole. For now I had to run the risk and hope another drive didn’t fail. Returning home to swap a drive was never going to go down well with the family.

I decided to order 4x 2TB SSD’s and went with the Samsung 870 QVO’s. They are def on the budget end of SSD’s but are cost-effective and given the limited network bandwidth on my Synology were more than adequate.

I first replaced the failed drive and then when this was complete extended the array to be 4x Disk before replacing the other 2 existing drives one at a time.

Everything is now back to being green and hunky dory. I have run scrubs to validate all data. I still have RAID 5 on both volumes but I have undertaken a task to improve some of my backup handling. Just In case…..