NAS & RAID · case log · HUL-2025-0928
The Grinding Started Long Before the Red Light.
The red light was the final event in the sequence. In a picture frame business in Grimsby, the box had sat on top of the mount cutter since 2018, out of the way of everybody’s elbows
, and there it stayed for seven years. After counter staff mentioned for two weeks that they were hearing a grinding noise somewhere behind the compressor
, ten days later the share would not open for anybody, and then the front light turned red and stayed red. WD agreed to replace the enclosure with a new unit under warranty. The shop’s own files were not considered as part of that process.
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What causes it.
All data on a single bay My Cloud is stored on a single hard drive. There is a very small Linux based server sitting next to that. The only function of that device is to provide access to the data on the single hard drive. All services or items that can be accessed by users (share, web pages, mobile apps, the status light, etc.) exist as a result of accessing the data on the single hard drive. As such, if the single hard drive fails all services will fail at exactly the same time. This does not degrade quietly; the entire system goes down instantly. Since the single hard drive is responsible for providing all services there is no ability within the device to allow service degradation. The employees' only indication prior to failure was approximately two weeks of grinding sounds coming from near the compressor.
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
Inside 5 minutes, the 8 TB disk we tested in-house responded. Reading from the disk had become unreliable due to the heads being worn down, and what the staff had heard was those heads missing. As the disk’s failure occurred internally within the enclosure, there was no visible sign from outside of the enclosure. The Linux on the board can only see that the disk has stopped working (gone silent), therefore the share, dashboard and status light all failed simultaneously.
Fit donor heads, then measure what waiting cost
We put a matching donor head stack in and completed the map before even doing any actual reads. A region of the drive reflected the wait time of two weeks. Every single night during that time the POS PC would copy over its orders to the failing heads and that area of the drive contains the damage. The box has no idea when to stop writing to a failing disk. It will write until someone turns off power.
Treat the image as what it is: layered Linux volumes
WD's storage is layered using Linux. Therefore any Windows based tool trying to find an NTFS file system returns nothing helpful. Viewing these layers, the images broke down into folders that the counter people knew by name (order books, customers' artwork, jobs, etc.) versus a collection of numbered files.
How it finished.
We used fresh media to carry the shop’s data back to them, and the lone hole in their data was laid bare as opposed to buried. The damaged areas contained only older customer artwork that was scanned several years ago. None of that came back in the recovery process and the report lists those specific files by name. We refitted the empty disk and the box went away for its warranty replacement.
What people read after this.
Other RAID & NAS cases.
Is yours doing the same?
Pull the power cord. Get a quote first, then send it to us. The diagnosis comes first and tells you which files are still accessible and which are not.