Devices · NAS units
It creeps up on everyone: the NAS that started as a safety net quietly becomes the single place the photos or the accounts exist. And when a volume degrades, the buttons the box offers you — rebuild, scrub, repair — do the killing. The kind thing is to pull the power, write each disk's bay on it, and post the bare drives from Exeter.
Talk it over with an engineer
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| What it says | What it usually means | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| Synology: Volume Crashed | The pool has lost more disks than its parity allows | Power down — don't let DSM repair it |
| Synology: Storage Pool Degraded | A single member is on its way out, but the volume still opens | The stakes rise with every running hour |
| QNAP: RAID unmounted / system volume not active | Assembling its own array is now beyond the box | Assemble it elsewhere |
| WARNING: Your files have been locked by DeadBolt | Every filename now ends in .deadbolt — ransomware | Photograph the screen, no reboot |
| Buffalo E14: The RAID array cannot be mounted | The LinkStation or TeraStation can't build its array | Note the E-number, switch off |
| Buffalo E16: Unable to find the hard drive | A member has failed or gone missing | The data's usually all still there |
| Buffalo E30: The hard drive may be damaged | The enclosure has ejected a drive | Leave that rebuild well alone |
Your device is logged under its own case number the day it arrives. An engineer finds the fault, tells you plainly what stands a real chance of coming back, and writes you one fixed quote. Nothing is charged for that look, nothing obliges you, and paid work starts only when you say so.
Every member is duplicated read-only, fragile sectors and all, so the enclosure never gets another go at the rebuild that was doing the damage.
Synology's SHR slices mismatched drives into equal chunks, runs an array across each slice and glues the lot with LVM — while QNAP and the rest stack things their own way. We rebuild every layer in software, bottom to top.
With the stack standing again, the btrfs or ext4 file system is repaired, your shares and folders reappear, and everything is ticked off against a listing before you sign it off.
Before any fee falls due you see a full listing of everything recovered and approve it. Your files travel back on brand-new media, return postage on us, and the case stays open until you've confirmed everything opens on your own machine.
The proof arrived in 2022: DeadBolt's first wave, launched 25 January 2022, encrypted QNAP units exposed to the internet — about 3,700 in that opening sweep — with more waves across the year; QLocker and eCh0raix had already shown the way. Every single victim was reachable from outside and running unpatched firmware.
A two-bay unit showing two red lights, then a DIY rebuild that trampled its own metadata. We imaged both disks past their bad sectors, then stitched the mirror back together section by section, always taking the cleaner copy — and handed the shared volume back whole.
It isn't. The array's whole definition lives on the disks, and the box only reads what is there. When the enclosure has died and the drives are healthy, it's one of the more cheerful jobs we see.
No — the Bristol lab takes the bare drives, not the box. Pull every disk and write its bay number on it — the one flagged as failed included — then leave the enclosure at home; the first job at our end is imaging the disks, and the box plays no part in that.
SHR — Synology Hybrid RAID — cuts mixed-size drives into matching slices, raises an array on each slice set, then ties the lot together with LVM — one volume sitting on stacked arrays. The job is unpicking those layers in the right order.
That's the enclosure dying, not your files vanishing. Rebuilt from images of the drives, volumes the NAS gave up on regularly come back whole.
Each power-up of a failing device takes more data with it. Open a case first — the look-over is free whichever way it goes.