NAS & network storage · bench notes · ADR-2025-3478
The Login Was the Symptom. The Noise Was the Fault.
It had been eight months since anyone had needed to use this WD network drive, and when she did go back to it, it had stopped letting me log in
and the box stated it is offline
. It also made strange noises every time it boots up
, and although that was the last piece of information in the whole story, it was the most important one. She did not want to spend the maker's price to fix it, so she had previously tried a USB to sata 2 adapter
. Although the drive appeared on her Mac, she received an error message stating that it isn't able to read the disk
. Both pieces of diagnostic information have common causes and only one of them is related to the data.
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What failed, and why.
The two issues arrived simultaneously, but only one of them matters. A device that refuses login and states it is offline could be many different software issues. However, a disk producing a noise it never used to make nearly always has something to do with its mechanism, and that one fact outranks the rest. If a disk's heads fail to operate above its platter then it has nothing to offer a network; therefore, the login screen and offline status are both downstream from this issue. In addition, it means every startup since the problem occurred has been a risk rather than a test. The adaptor results are a separate matter and provide no diagnosis whatsoever, because a network box keeps its data on Linux volumes, and even if you remove a healthy hard disk from the box, a Mac can only see it as unreadable. The cost starts at £500 + VAT for NAS and RAID type units, and placing a job costs nothing.
What the bench did with it.
The order of the job →| Equipment used | Its work on this job | The reason for it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Once the mechanism began reading again, the unit was imaged while keeping resets and timeouts very brief. | Mapped the heads first, then imaged one face of a platter per pass, with every reset, timeout and the power itself kept under our own control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Reached down into the box to find the actual disk. Therefore it was possible to determine how well the disk was functioning directly from the disk itself. | Instead of working around the drive's firmware and controller, it works with the two natively |
| UFS Explorer RAID Recovery | Unpacked the Linux volume, therefore restoring the folder structure. | Recovers the stripe order, then reverse engineers the volume manager the NAS layered above it |
What the bench did with it.
Take the disk out of the box first
The first step was to prevent it from starting. Once it was taken out of the case and put on a current-monitored power supply, the disk self-identified and the noise occurred again: the same sound, at the same point during startup, each time. This is mechanical behaviour, not login behaviour. None of these behaviours are observable from the outside of the box. All that the small Linux board can indicate is that its storage system will not respond. Therefore shares, dashboard and status all failed simultaneously.
Mechanism first, and only then the reading
Before any physical surface was read, both heads and platter assemblies were examined under magnification. Donor parts that had to be matched were matched. It is only after this process that imaging makes logical sense. Every single time the box attempted to start up since the noise began, there were weary passes of worn-out heads over those surfaces. Therefore the image was taken while keeping timeout values low and leaving the difficult ground until the final pass. There is absolutely nothing inside a network box to preclude any of this. If you leave it alone, it will continue to power the disk until the disk ceases to answer.
The volume underneath is Linux, not Windows
A network box keeps data on its disks using layers of Linux volumes. This is why a utility designed to search for NTFS volumes on a Windows operating system will have nothing to look at; and this is also why the adapter informed her about what it did. By disassembling the image in the correct sequence, the folder hierarchy appeared under its own names, as opposed to being displayed as a numerical list where the file structure was destroyed.
What went home.
The contents went home on new media, with items that could not be accessed by the read being identified by name within the report, rather than included in a cumulative total. The bare disk assembly was returned to its original casing. She took away one important lesson from this failure: the noise was the warning, and everything else that the box told her about occurred later. Return postage is paid on every job.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Other RAID & NAS work on the log.
Yours doing something similar? Power it down first.
Published prices are fixed. Memory cards and USB sticks are £250 + VAT. Any stand-alone drive is £300 + VAT. Drive configurations containing multiple disks (RAID, NAS or server) start at £500 + VAT. First assessments are always complimentary. Thereafter, data recovery charges are also fixed in advance and in writing, so you'll always know how much you owe before paying any money. Shut it down, get a quote first (by phone or with the form), then send it in or drop it off at our Guildford intake laboratory, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm (no appointment needed). On most jobs you only pay if we recover your data.