Experience with recovering a synology drive?

[tongue_of_colicab]

Hi,

Anyone ever tried data recovery on a Synology drive?

I have a two bay NAS with the disks running in basic mode. Yesterday evening it suddenly started beeping and after replacing one of the drives with an SSD I had laying around it booted again.

The disk that makes the nas refusing to boot does spin so I'm hoping the data is still intact but the partition or something is just messed up.

It's formatted in ext4 so I'm thinking about firing up a VM with my favorite OS and see if it's accessible but it be helpful if anyone has any experience with this.

Oh and the other disk is now reported as degraded (data appears fine). Is it safe to just click the fix button?

The disk with problems is a 4tb WD red so somewhat surprised it's having issues as I got much older drives running fine (a matter of luck no doubt). Though I think I had this disk in a USB enclosure for quite some time so that probably didn't help. That thing got so hot it was a bit painful to touch from time to time.

 

[Malo]

So you had 2 disks in a SYnology running JBOD and not mirrored?

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Yes, the disks don't hold very important data so I preferred storage space over security.

 

[Grall]

Mirror the drive(s) to other drives, then try the repair option? If it fucks things up, just restore the disk images and try something else...

 

[Lightman]

Synology support has tools available for PC for data recovery. Some time ago they were available only on request.
I've recovered couple of failed RAID 1 and RAID 5 Synology matrixes but never JBOD ..
Let us know what 'Fix' option does to your storage.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Just to be clear, the fix option is only showing with the other, still working drive, installed. I think that is just some partition info related to the NAS and not the data partition.

I'm picking up a WD red 8tb tomorrow (was planning on getting that anyway) and then I'll try if I can get anything off the failed drive by putting it in a USB enclosure.

I looked up my Amazon purchase history and I bought the drive 2.5 years ago so if it's really dead it should still be under warranty.

 

[Lightman]

Just to be clear, the fix option is only showing with the other, still working drive, installed. I think that is just some partition info related to the NAS and not the data partition.

I'm picking up a WD red 8tb tomorrow (was planning on getting that anyway) and then I'll try if I can get anything off the failed drive by putting it in a USB enclosure.

I looked up my Amazon purchase history and I bought the drive 2.5 years ago so if it's really dead it should still be under warranty.

Yes, Fix should only set the OS partition with right configuration info of how many HDD's and how are they partitioned. It will not bring your data back, but I was wondering if it would let you utilize new 2nd drive or just ask politely to put like for like instead.

 

[Malo]

Yes, Fix should only set the OS partition with right configuration info of how many HDD's and how are they partitioned. It will not bring your data back, but I was wondering if it would let you utilize new 2nd drive or just ask politely to put like for like instead.

Why wouldn't it use the new 2nd drive, especially on JBOD?

 

[BRiT]

It all depends on how it's configured and what it prefers. Some NAS setups need to have same-size drives. Though in JBOD mode it should be able to just use each drive separately. Unless it was really in a Raid-SPAN mode instead of JBOD, as I've seen really odd restrictions on SPANs.

That's a reason why I gravitated towards unRAID for my mass storage system -- I can add any size drives to the mix and still retain parity protection without any massively long rebuilds or expansion steps. The only caveat is the Parity drive must be as large or larger than data drives and even allows for dual parity. It has separate filesystems for each data drive, so even in worse case scenarios with losing more data drives than parity drives you won't loose the entire array, just the drives that died.

Anyways, I wish you luck in trying to recover data from the drive.

 

[Malo]

Well Synology defaults to SHR which allows mixed size drives so one would actually have to force it into antiquated RAID modes requiring identical drives.

Obviously with a 2 drive system is largely irrelevant though.

 

[orangpelupa]

Try photorec app . Or recuva But recuva usually only able to recover tiny amounts of stuff compared to photorec

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

So I loaded up the drive the synology wouldn't read on Linux and all the permissions are messed up but the files all appear to be intact and accessible. I'm suspecting the synology might have dicked up a software update.

So I'm gonna buy a new disk from amazon (love how brick and mortar stores never seems to have anything in stock when you actually need it), put it in, then add the second working drive and fix that and after that copy all the stuff from the "faulty" drive to the new drive.

As long as the synology fix option doesn't mess up the working drive all should be well.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Yesterday I finally got a new drive and all appears normal. Copying the files now and the old drive appears to be just fine.

However I think I might have made a mistake in buying a WD red 8TB. Because I had no complaints about the 4TB and 6TB red drive I have I didn't put in a lot of research. Turns out these disks make a extreme annoying clicking sound every 5 seconds or so. Sounds like head parking.

I'm sleeping in the same room as my NAS and I had to turn it off last night because I just couldn't sleep with it on. Its not super loud but its is a very noticeably noise. I logged a ticket with WD support but I think they'll just say that is how its supposed to be because its a helium drive and more noisy.

Any tips on soundproofing on the cheap?

 

[zed]

Simple method , which I've used before
Stick a cardboard box over it (the whole PC) or ideally just the HDD (if external), to decrease more, glue some material (eg Quilt Wadding, easy to glue on and quite cheap, keep in mind though this may make it warm but if the PC's doing bugger all perhaps this aint an issue)

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Yeah heat is the thing I'm a bit worried about. I might put it in a closet thought that might just make the sound louder.

Or maybe I should RMA the drive. Seems a lot of people have this issue with various models (including models I have that make no noise at all...). RMA doesn't always fix the issue though it seems. It sounds like this:

According to the WD support page its their wear leveling system that makes that sound.

 

[Grall]

According to the WD support page its their wear leveling system that makes that sound.

Yeah, it sounds like head seeks to me. WD could/should fix by moving the heads more slowly, because damn, that incessant noise would drive me personally up the walls insane tbh.

 

[Malo]

Well I wouldn't consider a Red Pro a drive you'd have in a device close to you. It's a rather expensive drive designed for a NAS, which is a device you have somewhere else other than around your workstation.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Yeah, it sounds like head seeks to me. WD could/should fix by moving the heads more slowly, because damn, that incessant noise would drive me personally up the walls insane tbh.

Yep, took me less than a minute to wonder wth it makes that much noise. I'll try moving it to my closet.

@Malo I got a red, not a red pro.

 

[Malo]

@Malo I got a red, not a red pro.

It's still a NAS drive, and you're using it in a NAS. The point still stands. My NAS sits in my basement very much separated from the PCs.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

It's still a NAS drive, and you're using it in a NAS. The point still stands. My NAS sits in my basement very much separated from the PCs.

One of the joys of Japan is living in cramped one room apartments. Other than that, no other drive I've ever owned over the past 15 years or so ever made a sound like this one. That includes two other WD Red's. So I don't think its that strange to assume this disk would be more or less silent as well. Don't think that has much do to with it being a "NAS" drive or not.