How do you know which hard drive is bad in a HD Enclusoure?

[The_Moves]

I want to build a NAS with a 5.25 HD expansion bay that supports hot-swapping. In the case of a HD failure, how would i know which one has died?

Do you know of a expansion bay that has status leds? Not just I/Os, but one that could change to Amber to mark the failed hard drive?

 

[DonDon]

My NAS, Thecus N5200, has a status indicator right on the front of the box. You can also see the status of each drive slot in the controller software. I just pull the drive from the indicated bad slot, pop in the new one, and it auto rebuilds.

For a DIY project, you will have to carefully label the cables or slots in the enclosure as to how they match up to the software slots in the Raid bios. You will need to be careful if you want to hot swap cause if you pull the wrong drive when 1 is already dead, and you can kill the entire array.

Otherwise, you will need to disconnect 1 drive, boot into the Raid bios, and see if that is the bad drive.

Don

 

[xenotype]

Was going to suggest running HDTach on the drives, that would reveal anomalies on the failing drive, but LEDs are way cooler, as well as realtime.

 

[Drudenhaus]

Do you know which is bad in the OS? If so you can just match the drive letter/device to the port number. Also, most RAID controllers allow you to "identify" the drive via a management utility (usually makes the LED blink or go solid). Lastly, many enclosures have status/activity and fail/error LEDs in which case the fail/error LED would be solid/blinking. Locating the bad drive depends on your specific config though and these are just general ideas.