NAS devices are great, especially those RAID array based, which allow larger storage capacity, redundancy and fault tolerance. While Network Attached Storages (NAS) may seem bullet proof, they fail fairly often, simply as regular drives do.
Recently, our technicians received a failed EMC2 NAS device with four 2TB Seagate Barracuda hard drives configured in a RAID 5 array. The NAS powers on, however the volume containing the data isn’t accessible due to multiple HDD failures.
Upon inspection, the technicians removed the drives one by one and tested each at the time to determine where the fault lies. As with the typical failure scenario on NAS devices, one of the 4 drives sustained severe disk scorching damage and then a 2nd drive sustained severe bad sectors deterioration in the firmware and user areas.
To successfully recover the data, along with the necessary firmware modifications to prevent any further disk deterioration, a clone with advanced data recovery cloning equipment was conducted for each drive. Once all the clones were completed to healthy new hard drives, the technicians used advanced RAID software to logically reassemble the array, gain access to the various volumes containing data, and finally, extract the files to a new WD My Passport HDD. The WD My Passport external drive was delivered from our location in Boston to the customer’s office location in Burlington MA.
We welcome any questions about RAID based NAS devices. We often provide suggestions and best practices for free.