Recover from NAS drive failure

I had a QNAP TS-212P fail. Initial investigations with QNAP support suggest that at least one of the hard drives failed and that perhaps the hard drive controller in the NAS itself is faulty too. I had this set up for the past three years to shut down every night and start up every morning automatically to save on energy costs. That was probably a mistake that shortened the lifespan of the hardware.

So far I cannot get data off either drive, and I cannot get the NAS to read data off the drives. One drive appears faulty, and the other is readable but is showing no data, making me worry that it somehow deleted everything. This was set up with RAID-0 to provide duplicate copies of my family’s files, mostly photos going back about 15 years. I had no other backup and may have lost this precious data.

The QNAP technician suggested I purchase a new NAS in the hope that it could read the good drive and self-replace it to two new WD Red drives that I purchased. I’m considering the TS-251B, TS-251+, and TS-231P2 primarily, although I’m also intrigued by the 3-bay TS-328 since I could do RAID-5 with it.

Budget and data robustness are the primary concerns. In addition to photos and other static files, we were hosting iTunes music and a fledgling movie collection. Playing those movies on my TV over my home network was fairly slow, so I really like the idea of having HDMI out on a NAS too.

What would you do? $300 2x4TB

You may try the ReclaiMe software to get your data back or use specialist services (it might cost a bit but they could do it). Backup is always necessary not only for drives failures but also flood, fire, and theft.

If it was just a controller fault then one you put those drives into a new 251B it might find the drives and work. If you had RAID1 then data is copied from one drive to another. But if you have RAID0 – there is no double data – it means data is written across two drives maximizing storage space. RAID0 would be difficult to recover.

With a new TS-251B, you can stream up 4K as well as transcode it for watching over the internet. HDMI is handy if you want to also use remote and have uninterrupted streaming. TS-328 is very slow NAS and made for backups only.

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