Secondary Disk Troubleshooting

No Secondary Disk

To protect your data (redundancy) a Mirror volume most have at least one secondary disk connected at all times.

If a volume does not have any secondary disks connected, SoftRAID will notify you that you have a Mirror with no secondary disk. While your data is not immediately at risk, this volume is not protected against a disk failure.

How to fix this problem

If you expect the secondary to be connected, Launch the SoftRAID Application. Determine whether the secondary disk is physically missing (failed), or if it has been damaged in some way. If the disk is missing, try removing it and reinserting it from the enclosure.
also, listen when you insert the disk (HDDs), if you can hear it spin up or not, and if yu hear any unusual clicking noises, which indicate failure.

If the disk has failed:
Obtain a new disk (If it is less than 3 years old, it is likely under warranty)
We recommend you “certify” the new disk before putting it into service.

Initialize the disk with SoftRAID (disks menu)

Select the volume and “Add secondary disk”.

We recommend when rebuilding that you set volume optimization to workstation (fast) or server (fastest). The other optimization settings are much slower as they prioritize user performance over rebuilding speeds.

Missing Secondary Disk

A SoftRAID Mirror volume is comprised of a Primary and one or more secondary disks. SoftRAID supports up to 15 secondary disks in a Mirror volume, any of which can be “offline” or disconnected.

Example:
A 3 disk mirror is set up and the owner removes one drive and stores it off site and connects it once a month to rebuild. This is a good practice to help protect your data.

The status of this volume will show “Mirror Missing Secondary disk”. This is not an error, just a notification or reminder that the disk is not connected.

If the secondary disk counter is accurate (you have one or more disks offline and are aware of this, you can ignore this message.

If the number of secondary disks is not correct (maybe you replaced a disk in the past and did not “remove missing secondary disks to reset the counter), then you can fix this easily.

How to fix this state