GRAID Failed

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Thiago Rossi

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Hi!

My G-RAID with Thunderbolt (G-RAID with Thunderbolt 2 | G-Technology) failed. I contacted the support. They were really nice and they are going to send me a new drive as it's inside the warranty period.

I was using RAID-1. My question is: when the new drive arrives is just a matter of plug it in? How does it know it should copy from the “good drive” to the new drive and not the other way around? Also, what happens if I put a driver with different files? I am not sure if the drive they are going to send will be formatted for Mac. I don't want to do anything wrong when the drive arrives. Has it happened to anyone?

Thank you for the help!

Thiago

(Is LaCie better than G-Tech?)
 
Welcome to the forum. This really is not a LR issue, However you can expect to get some support from the people that hang out here.

When you say "My G-RAID failed." What do you mean by that? Did a single drive fail or did the RAID Controller fail. If it is the RAID controller, then G-Technology may be sending you a new box with or without Drives installed. If that be the case, then all you need to do is swap out the drive in the bad unit with the drives in the new unit.

As for formatting, I'm not sure if G-Technology uses a Proprietary filesystem or one of the HFS journaled file systems. If they only send you a replacement drive you simply need to replace the bad disk with the good disk and the RAID Controller will rebuild the Disk from the existing data on the other disk.
 
Thank you Cletus! I tried to find other forums online but most of them were related to Photography of Film making. At least this one had space for Equipment/Off-Topic. I hope it wasn't a problem.

It was the drive that failed. The controller/enclosure is working fine and that's how I still access the good drive (but I am avoiding to use it). It was how I erased the failed drive too. I removed the good drive, switched the enclosure with the bad one and erased it. Now that it is erased the red light is gone, but I think I will send it for replacement anyways. The support is already waiting for it.

G-RAID comes formatted for Mac I think. But even it doesn't I can connect only with the new drive, format it and then use both. What I am afraid is when I plug two hard drive with different data I don't know what is going to happen! The G-RAID app will show and ask me what to do? Is there a drive a rack that is considered master so I should put the good one there and the new one in the other place. Maybe the G-RAID remember which one went red so I can't change the order of the drivers.

I was trying to find someone that went through the same situation. Does the controller know what drive was there when it was first set up (using part number/serial number for example)? I don't know the technical parts of how RAID works.

Now I have the good drive disconnect and the bad drive erased. I was thinking about trying to plug both together to see if it will restore to the blank drive just to see. I would erase it again to send to support.

I only have experience with RAID with LaCie, that allows me to remove the drive while it's on, but I never tried that and never had problem. I bought the second RAID from G-Tech because I wanted HGST drives. Now I don't know if I will buy LaCie or G-RAID next. But this is another talk.

Thank you again!
 
Your RAID is RAID1 meaning that Disk 1 is mirrored on disk2 Software and the RAID controller should recognize that one drive has data and the other does not and proceed to build the mirrored drive until all of the data is copied to the empty drive.

If you don't have a system backup of the RAID unit, you should. RAID is not backup. It is for continuous uptime ( hot swapping plug and play etc.) Something that non commercial users rarely need. If you do have a system back up of your critical user data including the data on the RAID unit, then you won't need to concern yourself about what the RAID controller is going to do with your disk containing the good data as you can restore it from your system backup.

I stopped using RAID because I got burned once with a failed RAID Controller and a proprietary filesystem that meant that I could not read my data on the two perfectly good disk drives.
 
I understand RAID is not backup. I actually have backup of the drives, but not 100% of the files. Basically I have two external “drives”, both RAID. One is a 8TB RAID (the G-RAID that had a disk that failed) and the other one is the LaCie RAID, but because the LaCie has half of the capacity I don't have a backup of everything in the G-RAID. Maybe I should use both as JBOD instead. I actually have a third drive with 2TB where I have a second backup of the RAW files only. I should have thought better about that. :-(
 
I used to turn all of my raid boxes into JBOD. Apple removed the software RAID option in the Disk utility with the release of ElCapitan. So I can't create these easily now. Now, I just address each disk as its own HFS+ volume. I have two WD RAID drives that I reformatted as individual disk units. And I have two 4 bay drive enclosure that at one time were set up a JBOD and now are singles
 
I am changing my LaCie to JBOD now. I think I still have to wait for the new drive to arrive to change the G-RAID from RAID-1 to JBOD, but I don't how to do it without losing data. When I have all like JBOD I will use script to make backups.

I don't know why I didn't think about that before. Thank you very much Cletus!
 
I received the new driver. It rebuilt the RAID in one day!

I changed my other RAID to JBOD. Because of space I will continue using the the 2x8TB as RAID copying files every evening to 2x4TB JBOD as backup. I had to split the backup but it's ok!

Thank you Cletus for the great advise.
 
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