Data recovery if the unit fails in years to come

WD Legacy Products Sentinel Products
1

Hi

i want to to find out what i can do if the sentinel DX4000 unit fails and how i can get to all my data?

i run the unit with 4 drives in a RAID 5 configuraton

i want to confirm that if th DX4000 unit fails can i just move the drives into a another DX4000 unit and access the data?

also if the unit fails in 5 years time and the DX4000 unit is discontinued wll the newer units be able to recognise the RAID on the drives?

Regards

2

We were told that you could just put the drives in another WD box and they would boot, but I have never had 2 boxes to test that.

That said, you should never just have one copy of valuable data.  I would recomend copy the good stuff to another sfae place.

3

Hi Gramps

Thanks for the reply

The storage is mainly for streaming media on my network so not really sensitive data dont mind losing it as i can rip all my dvds again and get all my songs and pictures from my ipod

i’m just concerned with the time to get it up and running again as i use it everyday

the hard drive i always keep a spare but i had a “promise” unit before where the controller failed and the unit basically said format and wouldn’t let me access the data no matter what i did so i want to try and avoid that whole thing as it took me the weekend to copy everything back on

ideally if i can just get a new unit and put the drives in it would be great as thats the quickest to get up and running again vs haveing to spend hours copying data back onto the drive

4

I believe the DX4000 uses the built-in Intel ICH10 RAID controller probably with custom firmware to support the auto-magic RAID1 to RAID5 conversion when adding drives.

That may mean it’s possible to transfer the drives to a motherboard using ICH10 to recover data in the absence of an actual DX4000. Not sure if the custom firmware would be an obstacle to this though.