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RAID5 - 3 of 4 Drives Dead - Possible Rebuild?

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OK, Hurricane Sandy killed one of our File Storage Servers. The device is a Iomega NAS 150d (i know, I cringed too) that is set-up as a RAID5 (Striping with Parity) configuration. The drives are Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB which are no longer in production. I have located some vendors that have used (OEM pulls) drives available.

If the company purchases 3 drives to replace the 3 dead drives, will the raid be able to be re-built w/o data loss? I do not know much about RAID5 other than losing 1 drive and being able to rebuild the raid. It looks like the odds are against us but I figured I would ask the experts out there and pray for a sliver of hope that we did not lose all of the data!

Thank you in advance for your time!

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The replace drive in RAID5, it can be larger than the raid member (it won't be an optimum set up), but it will work.

if you have more the 2 drives in RAID 5 dead, it is almost impossible to get it rebuilt.

But you need to try it before give up... and hand it over data recovery.

Replace ONE drive at a time. to see whether it can rebuilt or not.

I'm cross the fingers that you can...

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No clicking noises, no spinning, no nothing.... just dead. The server tries to bring them online but nothing happens.

I kind of figured that these were the answers I was going to get. :( 

In a last ditch effort to get these drives back to life, I located an ebay vendor from Canada that sells PCB boards for HDD's. He had in stock 3 PCB's that matched my drives exactly down to the firmware and site code. I will replace the boards and hope for the best!

Emerald I have not. I was going to do that yesterday and got busy at work with other things. Unfortunately I wear many hats here and couldn't spend anymore time on the server. Do you really think hooking them up to a PC might get them to spin up?

Well, I did test the motherboard on the Iomega but took a different approach. I took the one good drive that is left and I placed it in all 4 ports to see if I would get a steady blue light and sure enough, wherever I put the drive, that's the blue light that came online.

OK, the PCB's came in today and I got 2 out of the 3 drives to work now. 1 drive is completely dead. I swapped out the board with a couple boards that I knew worked fine and the drive just does not want to respond.

OK, so my next question is this: I know have Drive 1, Drive 2 and Drive 4 working. In order to rebuild or repair the RAID, I just replace Drive 3 and theoretically, all should be fine right?

OK, so I finally got the new HHD and placed it into the Iomega NAS. I fired it up and this is what I get in the Event Log:

  1. 0102 : 11/12/2012 01:23:24 : A drive has an invalid partition.
    

  2. 0100 : 01/01/1970 00:04:05 : A drive was removed or has failed, please check the unit.
    

  3. 0202 : 11/12/2012 01:28:36 : A RAID volume has failed.
    

  4. 0200 : 11/12/2012 01:28:41 : RAID volume degraded; please check the unit.
    

  5. 0300 : 11/12/2012 01:28:47 : A Volume has failed.


I am getting really frustrated with this NAS box....

Have you tried removing the new drive a restarting the NAS? Are all the HDD status lights showing correctly? Base on what you stated about the drives, you should really consider replacing the remaining three. Hope you backed up your data cause things are looking pretty iffy right now.

Well, I just threw in the white towel on this little adventure about 30 min ago. I was attempting to rebuild the RAID5 with R-STUDIO by making images of the HDD's and using their 'Virtual RAID' feature but Disk 1 started getting all kinds of read errors and it stopped making the image.

Most of the data on this NAS was backed up, but there is about 1 month's worth of work missing. This whole debacle has made us look a little deeper into our back-up set-up we have in place here. Personally, I am pushing for a cloud based set-up but we'll see what the decision makers decide.

Thank You to everyone who posted here to help.
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