NAS & RAID · bench notes · RDG-2025-2078
The Grinding Started First. The Red Light Was Weeks Late.
That light turned red a fortnight after the disk began to fail. Since 2018 a picture framer on Crockhamwell Road in Woodley had kept the box on a shelf above the mount cutter, chosen deliberately as somewhere where nobody was going to catch it with an elbow
. Nobody did. The complaint from the counter staff was a different one altogether: a grinding noise coming from behind the compressor
. Then, ten days on, no share would open for anybody and the front light stayed red. The enclosure is WD's problem, under warranty. What was inside it belonged to the shop.
Same fault on yours? Tell us what it is doing.
0800 6890668
What actually caused it.
One disk, and a small Linux computer beside it whose entire purpose is handing that disk to the network. Everything the shop could see — the shares, the browser page, the app on a phone, the indicator on the case — was a service working from the same platters. That is why nothing tapered off. When the disk stopped answering, all of it stopped inside the same minute, because none of it was ever independent of the disk. A fortnight of grinding was the only notice given. NAS and RAID recoveries are published from £500 + VAT, and the assessment that decides where a job sits costs nothing.
What this one needed on the bench.
How every job runs →| Bench tools | Its part in this job | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Mapped the heads with the donor stack fitted, before a surface was touched | It maps the heads before anything is taken off, keeps to one platter side per pass, and stays in charge of the resets, the timeouts and the power |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Held resets and timeouts short while tired mechanics were on the bus | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| UFS Explorer RAID Recovery | Took the Linux layers apart so the folders arrived as folders | Puts the array back together, then unpicks whatever volume manager the NAS laid over it |
What the bench did.
Take the disk out and assess it by itself
Out of the box, the 8TB disk identified itself inside five minutes. Getting a dependable read out of it was the difficulty. Its heads were worn out, and what the counter staff had been hearing for a fortnight was those heads missing track and being pulled back. From outside the enclosure none of that is visible. The Linux board can tell only that its storage has gone quiet, which is why shares, dashboard and indicator all failed on the same day.
Donor heads in, then price the delay
Once the donor stack was in, mapping came first and bulk copying second. Those two weeks of delay showed as damage gathered into one region. Each closing time, the order folder had gone across from the till PC to the box, pushing writes through heads that were already finished — and that is the region they landed in. No enclosure has any way of preventing that. It will go on writing to a failing disk until somebody takes the power away.
Unpick it as Linux volumes; NTFS tools are no help
Underneath a My Cloud sits a stack of Linux volume layers, and a Windows utility looking for NTFS will find nothing there it can work with. Taken apart in the right order, the image resolved into names the counter staff use every day: the order book, artwork filed under each customer, one job after another — not a numbered heap.
What went back.
New media went to the shop with the one gap set out plainly. Older artwork, scanned years ago, sat inside the damaged region and did not return; the report names those files individually. The stripped disk was sent back in its own case, and the empty enclosure went for its warranty swap. Return carriage is paid at this end on every job.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
More RAID & NAS work, written up.
If that sounds like yours, stop there.
Post it in as it is, switched off. Looking costs nothing, and you get one fixed figure in writing before any chargeable work begins — £250 + VAT for a card or stick, £300 + VAT for a single drive, from £500 + VAT for RAID and NAS. On most jobs, nothing is charged unless your data comes back.