My Cloud · DS118 · TS-133 · LinkStation · Seagate Central
A single-bay NAS is one hard drive in a small Linux box: a WD My Cloud, a one-bay Synology or QNAP, a Buffalo LinkStation, a Seagate Central. The drive carries a system partition, a swap partition and a data volume, ext4 or Btrfs, and it fails in every way a hard drive fails plus one more, which is the box in front of it dying and leaving a perfectly good drive that no PC will read. There is no RAID to rebuild and no set to reassemble; there is a drive to image once, and a volume to mount from the image. One single-bay NAS is £300 + VAT after the free look, fixed in writing, 3–4 days at the bench.
Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
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| What you see | The usual reason for it | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| Red light, dashboard unreachable | Failed firmware update or a dead board | Unit tested; drive imaged directly |
| Windows: you need to format the disk | A PC looking at a Linux volume | Say no; mounted from the image |
| Volume crashed / read-only | File system damage or bad sectors | Imaged; repaired on the image |
| Clicking from inside the case | Failed heads | Head work on the bench |
| Files vanished overnight (My Book Live) | The 2021 remote factory reset | Old volume rebuilt around the reset |
A case number goes on the parcel and a number on every drive the day it is opened, and an engineer settles what has actually happened before anything spins. The unit is examined on its own; each drive is assessed on our own equipment, never in a NAS that will try to rebuild. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.
On a single-bay unit the box and the drive are tested apart. A dead power supply, a failed board or a bricked boot flash leaves the drive untouched; a failed drive is taken to the clean bench. The unit's board comes with the drive where it holds anything the data needs.
The drive is imaged once, head by head where it needs it, and the data volume is mounted from the image: the mdadm wrapper opened, the ext4, Btrfs or XFS file system repaired on the image where it needs repair, and the files copied out.
Order, chunk size, parity rotation and the reshape point are read from the drives' own metadata and the array is reassembled in software: mdadm and LVM under SHR, X-RAID and QTS pools; a ZFS pool imported read-only; Drobo's BeyondRAID zones reconstructed. The file system, Btrfs, ext4, XFS or ZFS, is repaired on the virtual volume, and encrypted volumes are unlocked there with the key you supply. Never on the originals.
What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.
The update had failed and the unit would not boot; the owner did not reset it, which mattered. The drive was imaged on the bench, the ext4 data volume mounted from the image, and every folder came back with its name. The unit's board was fine; only its firmware had gone.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseIf the drive is healthy and the unit was the only fault, some makers migrate it. If the drive has any fault, the new unit will try to repair or reinstall over it. Send it here first if the files matter.
Not if you said no. The drive holds a Linux volume Windows cannot read. It is mounted from an image on the bench.
No. One drive, imaged once, and the volume mounted from the image. It is priced as one drive, £300 + VAT.
3–4 days at the bench after the free look.
£300 + VAT for one drive after the free look, fixed in writing.
Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the unit off and the drives in their bays.