NAS PCI-E 4 port Sata Expansion Card Issue

[CyBeRNoX]

Hi All,

So I have a Seagate Business 4 Bay NAS.
It has 4 x 2TB Seagate Drives in RAID5 with Parity and Striping.

Recently I have discovered that my share on my NAS was missing and discovered from the portal that the drive in bay 3 (HDD3) is not being detected. So I have gone through the trouble of cleaning up a spare 2tb drive with the exact same P/N so that I am sure my raid can be recovered. After replacing the drive, I have found there is still no HDD3 and I know for a fact that my HDD I have replaced is definitely working. So I removed the covers/etc of the NAS and have found that it uses some form of motherboard with PCI-E slot. Placed into the PCI-E slot is a 4-port Sata Expansion card. So to my knowledge of computers/RAID Configs, this should be testable with any computer and then I can determine if the Port 3 is working or not.

So my question/advice needed is the following:

1. Can I test the PCI-E expansion card in any computer?
2. Can I replace this with any PCI-E expansion card or advice regarding a compatible one for the NAS?
3. By assuming the raid is software raid, can I plug the drives into another computer and rebuild/recover the data?
4. Should I send this to Seagate and claim for warranty?
4.1 With the disks?
4.2 Would I loose my raid configuration on the NAS if they do RMA or Refurbish or whatever?
5. Cry in corner because of data loss...

If all the raid/home server guru's could give some feedback it would be appreciated...
[MENTION=766]ian_stagib[/MENTION] , [MENTION=225]idol[/MENTION] , [MENTION=334]BillyBob[/MENTION] , [MENTION=7584]Leetpro[/MENTION] , [MENTION=18288]shimmie[/MENTION] , [MENTION=64]ShockG[/MENTION] , @Wizzard

 

[ian_stagib]

1. I'd check the part number on the card to see if it looks like a normal pci-e card. If it does then I don't think you'll have a problem doing that.
2. If it has warranty then I wouldn't replace it myself, I'd claim on warranty. If it doesn't and it's only a sata expander then just try find something with the same chip that is used in the original but preferably try find the exact same one.
3. Can't move to another machine if it's software raid
4. Of course claim warranty if you can
4.1 if it came with disks, then send with disks
4.2 yes
5. That's probably gonna happen

Before going all out here, did you test the drive you took out in your machine? Does it work there? That way you know if the drive really was faulty or not. Also, you might want to check if it's not the data cable or the power cable at fault. You'll have a better idea after testing the faulty drive in your machine.