I've been bad. No backups.
My home server was running in a 3 disk raid and 2 disks failed within 24 hours of each other. Server is FreeBSD and the disks were in a ZFS RAIDZ pool. All 3 disks are 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 / model ST2000DM001/ PN: 1CH164-301 / FW: CC4H
My biggest mistake was not having any backups. My next biggest mistake was buying 3 disks two years ago at the same time which likely came from the same batch, and thus they might all be prone to a similar failure. There is approx. 18500 hours on each drive.
I had 1 drive fail first: the motor spins, then click click click, then the motor spin down. The BIOS does not see the drive. If it does see the drive, it sees it as only a 4 GB sized drive. The 2 remaining working drives were always seen as 2000 GB each. With only 2 drives working, the ZFS RAIDZ pool was still working in a degraded state and I could still read things ok.
So I picked up 2 new TOSHIBA 2GB DT01ACA200 drives to replace the broken one, and have a spare. These disks have slightly more logical sectors than the Seagates, so not a problem for a RAIDZ swap.
Before simply just replacing the bad drive and let it re-silver, I wanted to make a backup of the important stuff. So I started backing up the important stuff onto one of the new drives, and before I could complete that task, the 2nd Seagate drive failed in the same way !! click , click, click, then drive spins down, BIOS won't see it. Now I have 2 failed drives and the RAID won't come up. I didn't get all the data off.
Googling around shows me this is a common failure mode for the 2TB and 3TB 7200.14 Seagate Barracuda's. Wish I had known that earlier.
There's also a 1.8V LVTTL serial port on the drive and some serial port commands for resetting things on the 7200.11 but warnings that doing the same commands to the 7200.14 will likely kill it. There's enough misinformation out there to warrant not trying anything like that just yet. Some of the commands are to clear the SMART data and especially reset the reallocated sector counts (like it ran out, and cannot start now, but I'm not sure)
I'm thinking of doing the following:
1) a sector by sector copy of the one remaining good Seagate drive onto a Toshiba drive.
2) then trying to DIY a small cleanroom hood (just like like a chemistry hood, but with a positive pressure, HEPA filtered airflow outwards)
3) open the good drive and a bad drive and do a platter swap, close the drive, then try to copy a second Seagate drive onto a second Toshiba.
If that works, I can restart the server with the 2 Toshiba's and get a degraded RAID again.
So, does anyone think I have a chance in hell of being successful (with a DIY clean room like this)?
I would only need the swapped platter to last long enough to dump the sectors, which might take 2 to 3 hours , 4 hours tops. If I get a degraded RAID back, I just want to get my data off it, then reformat everything and start new.
Does anyone know and willing to share the 7200.14 serial port commands that might breathe some life into the drive?
Thanks!