Data Recovery Weekly

Always remember that as the uptime grows, the chance of not being able to restart susccessfully increases . That is, unless you take some special precautions. Had an UPS fail on our QNAP, like a couple of days ago. Before that, the uptime was something like several months. Lo and behold, the QNAP failed to come back online. It just sit there "SYSTEM BOOTING >>>" with all the drive LEDs blinking, no ping, nothing, and looked very much like a power supply failure. However, all the LEDs were blinking, and generally it look very busy doing something for about 30 hours I let it sit. When I finally get around to connect a VGA to it, there was nothing to be seen. Then, a couple of hard reboots took care of the problem, at least for the time being. Looks like next time the PSU has to be replaced.

For reference, we were using QNAP TS-639 Pro with six WD20EADS disks. After about half a year of use, the web-interface was running slower, so that we needed to wait for several minutes to obtain the list of the disks. Gradually, we noted that the array performance decreased significantly. It seemed obvious to assume that one of the member disks has been dropped from the array and a RAID5 was working in the degraded mode. However, all the member disks were marked as GOOD in the web-interface. It was suspicious that LEDs on the disk bays indicating the state and activity of the disks were blinking unevenly. Logically, for RAID5 one should expect almost symmetric load on the disks, but in fact, one of the disk LED was blinking much more frequently. Once we had run the bad blocks check on this disk through the web-interface, the disk dropped from the array in less than half an hour and its bay LED turned red. At this point, the web-interface began to work properly again. The disk taken fr...

We have a QNAP 639 Mega Hyper Super Turbo Station NAS unit. Long story short, web interface now refuses to work. Earlier, it was more of an intermittent PITA, but now that completely ceased to work. To be precise, the AJAX part of the interface never responds, leaving us without the array status, SMART data, whatever. It would just sit there displaying "Loading" message along with a stupid rotating AJAX thing for no end. Not exactly the performance one would expect from a $1500 unit. Maybe we should use it for a RAID 6 recovery as a practice target, because we have no RAID 6 recovery yet.