RAID & NAS · job record · NTG-2025-2253
Four Disks Out of a Box, and a Monday at Ten.
A tender for a school extension was largely written when the QNAP dropped off a Derby architects' network on the Thursday. Friday was worse rather than better: the enclosure is dead, but the disks all look healthy
. By the time we heard from them the chassis stood empty, four drives on a desk, each of them labelled by bay as they came out
. What they wanted was a price that would not move, plus a straight answer on will it be back for Monday
.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
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What went wrong, and why.
Scheduling is what rescues a weekend. Cutting stages out is not. Nothing was skipped here; the stages simply ran across one another. Four disks went onto four imagers at the same moment, so no drive sat in a queue. Analysis of the layout got under way on the first copy to complete, while three others were still transferring. Equipment standing about is time you do not recover. There was a faster option, of course — rebuild on the practice's own disks, take no copies, gain half a day. Choosing it stakes a tender on four ageing drives every one of which has to read faultlessly first time, and if any of them had weakened during the rebuild, there would have been no fallback at all.
The bench work this one took.
How the work runs →| Kit on the bench | What it did on this job | Why we reach for it |
|---|---|---|
| Atola TaskForce 2 | Four imagers going at once, which is where the weekend was found | Every member of a set copies in parallel, so no disk waits its turn behind another |
| PC-3000 Portable PRO | Checked condition and firmware state across all four before imaging began | Vendor-level access, out of a case parked next to the imagers |
| UFS Explorer RAID Recovery | Worked out the bay order, the stripe width and the rotation of parity from the completed copies | Works the stripe out again, then unpicks the volume manager the NAS laid on top |
What happened on the bench.
An imager each, and no queue behind any of them
Midday brought the box in, and within the hour all four drives were turning on imagers of their own, where each stayed until its last sector had gone across. Put a set like that through one machine in sequence and three days of array turns into a week. Four in parallel is what leaves a weekend standing.
Establish the layout while the copies are still transferring
Metadata off the earliest finished copies narrowed matters to a small number of candidate layouts: which bay sat where, how wide a stripe ran, and the way parity rotated. Every candidate was put against genuine directory structures found on the volume. None was accepted on the grounds that a given maker's controllers tend to do it one way. The layout had been proved and written down before the last copy closed.
Assemble in software, and check the tender documents first
In software the four images went back together, and the volume mounted at the first try with a clean filesystem. Checking ran in the order the office needed rather than the order the disks offered: drawings, then specification, then cost plan, then appendices. As each document in the pack surfaced it was confirmed to them by telephone, long before the rest of the folders had been gone through.
What was returned.
Sunday ended with the checked files already at the office, and on Monday the tender went in off the practice's own drawings. Two things did that: overlapping the stages, and picking the telephone up with a straight answer every time somebody asked how far along the job was. No stage got dropped for the sake of the date.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
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