Using Hitachi Travelstar 5K1000 in Synology DS409slim

  2014-03-06      416 words, 2 minutes

• ds409
• ds409slim
• dsm
• hitachi
• raid
• shr
• synology
• travelstar

The other day, my Syno DS409slim started beeping. It turned out that two of the Toshiba MK1059GSM disks had SMART errors. I wanted to get some new but they are not available any more. After looking at my preferred e-shop, I finally went for Hitachi Travelstar 5K1000 (HTS541010A9E680). It is not listed in “What hard drive models are supported by Synology products?” page. But it seems to be working fine ; for a bit more than three weeks now.

Here’s a small summary about replacing the disks on Synology DS409slim using DSM 4.2 and SHR volume.

I’ve already done a live disk-replacement on my Syno. But it was to increase the whole size of the RAID volume. This time, the RAID is on fire…
The process is quite straight forward though. Connect to DSM and review the issue. Using the “Storage Manager”, you can run SMART tests to ensure the disk(s) has unresolvable issues. When done, backup the very most critical data that lie on the NAS. Then, remove the faulty disk. Beware to only remove one at a time ; to ensure RAID sanity.

From DSM, in the “Storage Manager”, select the concerned volume and click the “Manage” button. Choose the “Repair” option and follow the wizard. Try to not write much on the SAN while it is reconstructing the RAID. Reading data is OK if not “too much” IO is required.

In my case, I did the whole procedure twice. I had one failed disk and one with bad SMART errors. Here’s a few screenshots of the whole procedure.

Regarding operation delay, here’s a few timestamps:

• 2014/02/21 17:52: Disk [2] was inserted.
• 2014/02/21 17:56: System starts to repair [Volume 1] with disk [2].
• 2014/02/21 18:06: System successfully checked consistency of System Volume [Root].
• 2014/02/22 17:09: System successfully repaired [Volume 1] with disk [2].
• 2014/02/22 17:11: System successfully checked consistency of System Volume [Swap].
• 2014/02/22 18:08: Disk [1] was removed.
• 2014/02/22 18:12: Disk [1] was inserted.
• 2014/02/22 18:13: System starts to expand [Volume 1] with disk [1].
• 2014/02/22 18:18: System successfully checked consistency of System Volume [Root].
• 2014/02/23 21:55: System successfully repaired [Volume 1] with disk [1].
• 2014/02/23 21:58: System successfully checked consistency of System Volume [Swap].

Note that the Travelstar 5K1000 seem to run cooler than the Toshiba MK1059GSM. The first is 9.5mm height whereas the second is 12.5mm. The extra room probably does help for cooling. In terms of I/O, I didn’t notice any latency. So this disk seem to do pretty well.