NAS & RAID · case log · HUL-2025-0928
The Grinding Started Long Before the Red Light.
The red light was the last thing to happen, not the first. A picture framer in Grimsby had run the box since 2018, up on the mount cutter out of the way of everybody’s elbows
, and there it sat for seven years. Counter staff spent a fortnight remarking on a grinding noise somewhere behind the compressor
. Ten days after that the share stopped opening for anyone, and the front light went red and stayed red. WD will swap the enclosure under warranty. The shop’s own files are no part of that.
Sounds like yours? Ring us.
0800 6890668
What causes it.
A single-bay My Cloud holds one disk. Next to it sits a small Linux computer whose only task is to serve that disk out. Every part you touch — the shares, the browser page, the phone app, the status light — is a service, and all of them run from the same platters. So nothing degrades quietly. The disk stops answering and everything stops in the same second. None of it was ever independent of that one disk. The shop's only warning was a fortnight of grinding.
The tools this one needed.
The steps we follow →| The gear | What this one did | Why we have it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Mapped the donor heads first, then took the surfaces one by one | Grades each head first, reads one surface at a time, and keeps resets, timeouts and power under control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Held resets and timeouts short while the worn mechanism worked | Copying is run at firmware level, with the PC-3000 in charge |
| UFS Explorer RAID Recovery | Unwound the Linux volume layers, so folders arrived as folders | Puts the array back together, then unwinds the volume layers a NAS lays over it |
The stages.
Get the disk out and judge it on its own
The 8TB disk answered on the bench inside five minutes. Reading was no longer reliable — its heads were worn, and what the staff had heard was those heads missing. From outside the box you cannot see any of this. The board’s Linux registers only that its storage has gone silent, which is why shares, dashboard and status light all failed at once.
Fit donor heads, then measure what waiting cost
In went a matched donor stack, and the map was finished before any real reading began. The fortnight of waiting showed up in one region of the disk. Night after night the till PC had copied its order folder across, onto heads that were already failing, and that band holds the damage. The box has no way of knowing when to stop. It writes until somebody pulls the plug.
Treat the image as what it is: layered Linux volumes
WD's storage sits in stacked Linux layers, so a Windows tool looking for NTFS comes back with nothing useful. Read as the layers they are, the image resolved into folders the counter staff knew by name — the order book, artwork by customer, job by job — rather than a heap of numbered files.
How it finished.
Fresh media carried the shop’s files home, and the one hole in them was set out plainly rather than buried. What sat on the damaged band was older artwork, scanned years back; none of it returned, and the report lists those files by name. The emptied disk was refitted and the box went away for its warranty replacement.
What people read after this.
Other RAID & NAS cases.
Is yours doing the same?
Turn it off. Send it to us. The diagnosis comes first. It says which files are still readable and which are not.