A friend needed storage — somewhere safe for videos and photos at home. A few options came to mind, including a Synology DiskStation. That’s what we went with.
It ran quietly and reliably for about four years. Importantly, this wasn’t a technical user, but they were comfortable with it and happy it just worked.
Then, about a month ago, I got a call:
“My server is dead.”
Not a great start.
It turned out there had been several sequential local power cuts. After that, the NAS reported that no drives were found. On startup, both disks made a repeating seek-and-click sound for about a minute before settling into normal spinning.
I started with the obvious checks, trying not to risk the data. The drives were mirrored, so testing one at a time felt safest.
A quick search suggested a possible NAS controller failure. That seemed plausible, so I tried a replacement unit — same model, same setup.
Exactly the same problem.
At that point I connected a single drive to a Linux machine. The system could see it, but it was clearly not healthy.
The real question was this:
how do two drives fail at the same time, in the same way?
Both were Toshiba N300 4TB NAS drives. My suspicion shifted towards something lower-level — possibly firmware or controller issues triggered by the power events. That’s well beyond anything I’d attempt to fix directly.
The drives have now been sent to a data recovery specialist, Datatrak in Cardiff. They quote an 85% recovery rate, so for now it’s a waiting game.
An update will follow.