Devices · NAS enclosures
Most hardware tells you plainly when it is broken. A NAS does not. Shares keep mounting, files keep opening, and the fault sits there for weeks with nobody the wiser. Then the web interface starts offering to rebuild, scrub or repair, and by that stage those three buttons are the fastest route to losing the pool outright. Power it down instead, leave it down, and post it to us from Birmingham.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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| What you see | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Synology: Volume Crashed | More members have dropped than the parity can cover | Shut it down before DSM tries to fix it |
| Synology: Storage Pool Degraded | One disk is fading and the shares carry on regardless | Every hour it stays on costs you |
| QNAP: system volume not active; RAID unmounted | The unit cannot put its own volume together | Build it somewhere else |
| DeadBolt — WARNING: Your files have been locked | Ransomware; every file now ends .deadbolt | Take a photo of it, and touch nothing |
| Buffalo NAS E14: Cannot mount the RAID array | A TeraStation or LinkStation that cannot bring its array up | Write down the E-number, then power off |
| Buffalo NAS E16: The hard disk was not found | One disk has failed outright, or is no longer seen | In most cases the files are still there |
| Buffalo NAS E30: The hard disk may be broken | The box has thrown a disk out | Do not let it rebuild |
Every item gets a case number of its own the day it lands. An engineer then works out what has actually failed and tells you plainly which files have a real chance of coming back and which do not. Only then does a price follow: one figure, fixed, in writing, and it costs you nothing to see it. Nothing is charged until you say yes.
Every disk is read end to end onto imaging hardware, weak surfaces and all. After that we only touch copies. Your enclosure stays off, so whatever it was doing to the array cannot start again.
There is seldom a single volume to find. On Synology it is matched partitions cut from disks of different sizes, an array over each group, LVM binding the lot. Buffalo, Netgear and QNAP each do it their own way. We rebuild every tier in software, starting at the bottom.
With the stack standing, the work moves up a level. Damage to btrfs or ext4 is repaired, your shares and folders reappear under the names you gave them, and you get the full listing to look over before we call the job done.
No invoice is raised until the full list of recovered files has sat in front of you and you have said go ahead. Your data comes back on media we buy new, posted at our expense, and the job is not closed here until every file has opened on your own machine.
The 2022 wave put the matter beyond doubt: when DeadBolt first swept through on 25 January 2022 it reached somewhere near 3,700 QNAP boxes standing open to the internet, and it came back repeatedly over the months that followed. eCh0raix and QLocker had already been across the same territory. Every victim had two things in common: a unit visible from outside, and firmware nobody had got round to updating.
Two red lights the box could still have come back from; the rebuild that followed could not, because it wrote over the metadata the unit kept for itself. Both disks were imaged past their bad sectors, and at every point the mirror was rebuilt from whichever copy read cleanest, until the shared volume stood whole again.
Rarely. What the volume needs to stand again — disk order, stripe size, the layers above — lives on the disks, not the shell. Good disks inside a dead enclosure is a better outcome than most.
Either works for a NAS. Post it to the Manchester lab as it stands, disks left in their bays, if that saves you a job. Servers differ — disks only, each labelled with the bay it came from. Nothing is touched before it is imaged.
Synology Hybrid RAID stops odd-sized disks stranding capacity. Every disk is split into partitions that match across the set, an md array goes over each group, and LVM glues the results into one volume. Recovery means taking that stack apart, a layer at a time.
No. That is the box saying what it can no longer do, not what the disks hold. Copy each one, stand the volume up in software, and a pool DSM wrote off usually reads in full.
Every extra power-up takes something off a drive that is already going. Leave it switched off and let the free diagnosis say what still reads.