My how the mighty have fallen...

I purchased a Fantom Drive MDC1000 (1TB) about six months ago. I have been using it as a reliable backup until this past weekend. I believe there was a power outage during the middle of a scheduled rsync to the external drive. From what I can tell, filesystems don't like losing power in the middle of a big write!

Okay, so I am pretty convinced that the drives are fried at this point. I fired the thing up last night to try a resurrection. The device is detected through USB when I turn it on, but doing a "dmesg | tail" results in errors and the device never shows up in /proc/diskstats. The "working" light stays on continuously and the drives just continue to spin. They got so loud last night, in fact, that my wife and I thought a bunch of crickets had invaded the house!

The crux of the matter: I would like to continue to use this unit, but I know I will be replacing the two WD 500G drives that are inside. I thought about taking each of them out and connecting them via SATA in my desktop to see if I could tackle/clean each of them separately.

Question: How are these drives formatted such that the two individual 500G drives show up as 1TB? Is each drive formatted separately as an individual 500G drive and then the controller in the enclosure handles the rest? Would it be as simple as purchasing two new 500G SATA drives and plugging them into the enclosure?

As always, thanks for the help and advice. This place is great considering the cost of admission

-bmw

I suspect that they are using JBOD (that's a type of RAID). You could achieve the same under Linux by using LVM, which can be set up to span both disks.

But maybe the disks are fine and it's the controller that has passed on?

And why would your purchase new drives? Don't you think you are entitled to a free replacement if they are only six months old?