A month or so ago I booted my Mac and noticed that I didn’t see my NAS (the Synology DS408 I mentioned earlier) in the Finder. I had a look at the status lights and noticed the drive light of the second drive was blinking irregularly as if it was reading or writing data. It wasn’t possible to SSH into the machine anymore. I tried to restart it with the power button, but that didn’t seem to have an effect. It only started blinking and then nothing happened. In the end I pulled the plug and let it sit there for a while.

Later I tried to turn it on again, but it didn’t seem to want to boot after pressing the power button. I took the electricity off again and a few minutes later turned it on again. It did boot that time, but drive 2 seemed to be dead. The NAS beeped loudly to show its discomfort. I shut it down again, took drive 2 out and put it back in. Somehow the drive came back to life again and I could rebuild the RAID configuration.

But I was not comfortable with the situation. Why did the drive fail in the first place? Did it fail? Was it a loose connector? Or did the NAS malfunction? Oh well, the feeling of discomfort slowly disappeared with time as the NAS kept performing nicely.

Last week it happened again… Drive 2 failed. I bought a new 2 TB Hitachi DeskStar drive and replaced drive 2. Time will tell what will happen. Will this drive fail too?

So far I have observed it runs a bit hotter than the 1 TB drives in the nas.

I chose a 2TB drive because I am going to replace the other drives with 2 TB drives too.