Devices · Network storage
A failing NAS gives no obvious sign. Shares still mount, files still open, and a dead disk can sit in the chassis for weeks before anybody notices. The danger comes next: DSM or QTS offers to scrub, repair or rebuild, and those buttons finish off more pools than the fault itself. Switch it off, and leave it off. Boxes come to us from studios in Cardiff's Roath, practices across the Vale, a builder's office in Caerphilly.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
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| What shows up | What has gone wrong | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| Synology: Volume Crashed | Parity can no longer cover the disks that have gone | Power off before DSM offers to put it right |
| Synology: Storage Pool Degraded | A disk has dropped and nothing above it has noticed | It gets worse each hour it runs |
| QNAP: system volume not active; RAID unmounted | The box cannot mount the volume it built | Assemble it elsewhere |
| DeadBolt — WARNING: Your files have been locked | Ransomware; every file renamed .deadbolt | Photograph the screen, then touch nothing |
| Buffalo NAS error E14: Cannot mount the RAID array | The array is intact, but the box will not bring it up | Note the E-number down, then pull the power |
| Buffalo NAS error E16: The hard disk was not found | A disk has died, or the box can no longer see it | The files are usually still sitting there |
| Buffalo NAS error E30: The hard disk may be broken | The box has ejected a disk | Do not allow a rebuild |
The diagnosis costs you nothing. Every item that arrives is logged under a case number of its own, and an engineer works out what has actually failed — then tells you plainly which files can come back and which cannot. The price follows that: one fixed figure, in writing, and no work begins until you have read it and said go ahead.
Each disk is copied in full onto dedicated imaging hardware, tired patches and all. From then on the work happens on the copies. Your enclosure stays switched off here, so it cannot resume what it was doing to the pool.
A NAS volume is rarely one thing. Synology stacks matched partitions, an md array over each set of them, then LVM across the top. Buffalo, Netgear and QNAP each have their own arrangement. We stand every tier back up in software, lowest one first.
With the stack standing, btrfs or ext4 gets its repairs. Your shares come back under the names you gave them, folder structure intact, and you see the complete listing and check it over before anybody here calls the job finished.
Nothing is billed while you are still deciding. A complete listing of what came off the drive reaches you first, and the invoice only follows your yes. Files travel back on media bought new for the job, return postage ours, and we do not close it here until every one of them opens on the machine you will use.
What 2022 settled: DeadBolt's first run, on 25 January 2022, took in somewhere near 3,700 QNAP units that were reachable from the open internet, and further waves followed through the months after. QLocker and eCh0raix had worked the same ground already. The victims shared two traits: a box exposed to the internet, and firmware left at whatever version it shipped with.
Two red lights, and the box could still have been saved. The rebuild someone started afterwards was what it could not survive: that wrote straight over the unit's own metadata. Both disks were imaged past the bad sectors, then the mirror was rebuilt piece by piece, each block taken from whichever copy read cleanest. The shared volume came back whole.
Usually not. Everything needed to stand the volume back up — bay order, stripe size, the layers above — is written on the disks, not into the case. Healthy disks in a dead enclosure make one of the better calls we take.
The disks on their own. Our intake lab in Bristol takes bare drives, so pull them a bay at a time and mark each one with its bay number before it is packed. Post it fully insured, or drop it in. Nothing is read until every disk has been imaged.
Synology Hybrid RAID exists so mismatched disks do not strand capacity. Each drive is cut into partitions that pair up across the set, an md array covers each pairing, and LVM binds those arrays into the volume you see. We unpick that stack tier by tier, from the bottom.
No. That is a statement about what the enclosure can still do, not about what the disks hold. Image each drive, assemble the pool in software, and a volume DSM gave up on generally reads end to end.
A failing drive has only so many starts left in it. Spend none of them. Keep the power off, and the free diagnosis will tell you what is still readable.