NAS & RAID · bench notes · NTG-2025-2078
The Grinding Came First. The Red Light Was a Fortnight Behind.
That disk had been failing for a fortnight before the light on the front admitted anything. A picture framer on the High Road in Beeston put the box on the shelf over the mount cutter back in 2018, and chose that shelf deliberately: it was the one spot nobody was going to knock with an elbow
. Nobody ever did. The complaint from the counter was of an entirely different order — there is a grinding noise behind the compressor
— and ten days after that, every share was shut and the indicator had settled on red. WD owns the enclosure problem, and the enclosure is under warranty. The contents were the shop's own.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
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What went wrong, and why.
There is one disk in the box. Beside it sits a small Linux computer whose whole reason for existing is to offer that disk to a network. Shares, browser page, phone app, the light on the case: every one of them was a service reading the same platters, so none of it was ever independent of them. Which is why the failure was not gradual. The disk stopped answering, and inside a minute the whole lot had gone with it. Fourteen days of grinding was all the notice anybody got. From £500 + VAT is the published figure for NAS and RAID, and nothing is charged for the assessment that places a job.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Fitted the donor stack, then mapped the heads before any surface was read | One platter side per pass, with the heads mapped before a single sector is taken off, and the resets, the timeouts and the power all held under our control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Timeouts and resets held short, because the mechanics doing the reading were tired | Reads through the drive's own firmware and controller instead of working round them |
| UFS Explorer RAID Recovery | Took the Linux layers apart so folders arrived as folders | Works the stripe out again, then unpicks the volume manager the NAS laid on top |
What happened on the bench.
Get the disk out of the box and judge it alone
Free of the enclosure, the 8TB disk named itself within five minutes. What it would not do was read reliably. The heads were worn through, and what the counter had been listening to for a fortnight was those heads losing track and being dragged back. From outside the case none of it is visible. All the Linux board can register is that its storage has fallen silent — hence shares, dashboard and indicator failing together on one day.
Donor heads in, then count what the fortnight cost
Mapping came first once the donor stack was in; bulk copying second. Fourteen days of delay had concentrated the damage into one region, and there was a reason for that. At closing time each day the order folder was copied from the till PC to the box, so all of those writes went through heads already at the end of their life, and they landed where the heads were worst. Nothing in an enclosure can prevent it. Left to itself, the box writes to a failing disk right up until the power comes off.
Linux volumes underneath, so NTFS tools see nothing
Volume layers stacked in the Linux fashion are what a My Cloud keeps its data on, which leaves a Windows utility hunting for NTFS nothing at all to work with. Peeled back in the correct sequence, the image resolved into the names the counter staff use out loud all day: the order book, and artwork filed by customer, job by job instead of as a numbered heap.
What was returned.
The shop got new media, with the one gap described plainly. Artwork scanned years ago had been sitting in the damaged region and none of it returned; the report lists those files by name. Back in its own case went the stripped disk, and off went the empty enclosure for its warranty swap. On every job we pay the carriage home.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
Other RAID & NAS jobs, written up.
Sounds like yours? Switch it off before anything else.
£250 + VAT covers a card or a USB stick; a single drive is £300 + VAT; RAID and NAS start from £500 + VAT. Nothing is charged for the first look, and a fixed figure reaches you in writing before any chargeable work begins. Switch the device off, leave it alone, and post it in. On most jobs, no data back means no fee.