RAID & NAS · job record · RDG-2025-2253
Four Disks in a Box, and a Monday Deadline.
Ten o'clock Monday was the deadline for a school-extension tender, and most of it was written already when, on the Thursday, the QNAP disappeared off a Newbury architects' network. Friday was no better: the box is finished, the disks look fine
. By the time anyone rang us all four drives were out of the chassis, labelled by bay as they came out
. Two things were asked of us: a price that would hold, and an answer to will it be back for Monday
.
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What actually caused it.
What saves a weekend is scheduling, not corner-cutting. Every stage still happened; they were simply run in parallel. Four disks, four imagers, all started together, so no drive queued behind another. Layout analysis began on the first copy to finish while the slower ones were still going. Idle hardware is lost time. And yes, a quicker route existed: rebuild directly on the practice's own disks, skip the copies, save half a day. That route stakes the tender on four ageing drives all reading flawlessly at the first pass, and if one had faded mid-read nothing would have remained to work from.
What this one needed on the bench.
How every job runs →| Bench tools | Its part in this job | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| Atola TaskForce 2 | Four images running in parallel, which is where the weekend came from | Takes every member of a set at once, so nothing sits waiting behind another disk |
| PC-3000 Portable PRO | Checked condition and firmware state on every drive before imaging | Vendor-level access, out of a case sitting next to the imagers |
| UFS Explorer RAID Recovery | Worked out bay order, stripe size and parity direction from the completed images | Puts the array back together, then unpicks whatever volume manager the NAS laid over it |
What the bench did.
One imager per disk, and no queue
Midday, and the box was with us. All four drives were spinning on imagers inside the hour, and every one stayed there until its final sector had transferred. One machine taking a set in sequence turns three days of array into a week of work; four imagers in parallel keep a weekend intact.
Work out the layout while the imagers are still busy
The first images to finish yielded metadata, and that narrowed things to a handful of possible layouts — bay order, stripe width, the direction of parity rotation. Each possibility was tested against genuine directory structures on the volume. None was taken on trust because a maker's controllers generally do it one way. The layout was documented and proved out before the last copy closed.
Build it in software, and verify the tender before anything else
The four images went back together in software, and the volume mounted at the first attempt with a clean filesystem. Verification ran in the order the practice needed things, not the order the disks offered them: drawings, specification, cost plan, appendices. Each document in the pack was confirmed to them over the telephone as it surfaced, long before the remaining folders had been worked through.
What went back.
The checked files were with the office before Sunday ended, and the tender went in on the Monday off the practice's own drawings. That happened for two reasons: overlapping stages, and a straight answer down the telephone every time somebody asked where things stood. No stage was dropped in order to hit the date.
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