Tuesday, 26 February 2013

NAS Data Recovery (Network Attached Storage)

Today's topic is about the use of network attached storage (NAS) units and common problems that require NAS data recovery. Some examples of NAS units include the Buffalo Terastation, Linksys NSLU2, and the Maxtor Shared Storage. I'm sure I don't need to say it- but NAS devices are great. However, they are not exempt from failure. Inside the NAS unit, there is normally more than one hard disk configured in a RAID array of some level. The normal rules when dealing with a RAID apply. You must keep the unit backed up! As we have learned in previous blog entries, there are certain levels of RAID can be risky (think RAID 0). For the most part, NAS problems fall into three categories: 1) disk failure within the unit, 2) user error, and 3) NAS unit failure. Many things can happen to cause disk or unit failure including power surge, system crashes, and viruses. Sometimes users can accidentally cause problems by performing a reformat of the NAS unit or deleting their files. Yes, NAS is great....but just remember to treat it like any other storage medium and back up your data!!!

Now for the joke of the day: 

A man goes into a pet shop to buy a parrot. The shop owner points to three identical looking parrots on a perch and says: "The parrot on the left costs $500 dollars"."Why, does the parrot cost so much?" asks the man. The owner says, "Well the parrot knows how to use a computer".The man then asks about the next parrot and is told that this one costs $1,000 dollars because it can do everything the first parrot can do plus it knows how to use the UNIX operating system.Naturally, the increasingly startled man asks about the third parrot and is told that it costs $2,000 dollars. Needless to say this begs the question, "What can it do?"To which the owner replies, "To be honest I have never seen it do a thing but the other two call him boss!"

Fire Damaged Hard Drives

I would like to take a moment to mention a few things about fire damage to hard drives. We received an interesting job over the weekend which was a Dell Poweredge server that had been in a fire. Amazingly, the server was in pretty good shape (this will not always be the case!). There were 4 hard drives in the server configured in a RAID 5 array. The hard drives were burnt somewhat and smelled of soot. We were able to repair the disks, get images of all 4 disks, destripe the RAID, and recover the data by Monday evening. This is probably as lucky as you will get working with fire damaged hard drives. This is why it is so important to perform regular backups of your data and store it offsite. The fate of the company was pretty much riding on the condition of these 4 little hard drives.

Now for some humor. Going forward, for each blog entry I will include a joke of the day. Sounds kind of corny-but if it makes readers laugh and lighten up, then it has served its purpose:
One day two drinking buddies, Jim and Dave, were working on aircraft at JFK airport in NYC. They got fogged in and finished up their work early and were sitting around bored. Jim spoke up, “Man I really need a drink!”“You know I heard a rumor you could drink jet fuel and get drunk.” Dave said.“Really?” said Jim.“That’s what I heard. Wanna try it?”“Sure, hell I’ll try anything once!” So with that they poured themselves a couple of glasses and began drinking the jet fuel. They sipped a little bit to find it actually tasted quiet good. So they drank more and more and sure enough they got stoned drunk. The next morning Jim awoke feeling like a million bucks he jumped up wet to the bathroom feeling great like he was floating on air he hadn’t felt this good in years. “Wow!” He said. About that time Jim’s telephone rang… “Hello?”“Hello Jim, this is Dave. How are you feeling this morning?”“Man I feel great, no hang over, no sick, I feel like a million bucks. How about you?”“Me too, but I have one question for you.”“Sure, what is it”“Have you farted yet?”“Ummmmm No. Why?”“DON’T. I’m in Phoenix!”

Clicking hard drives

A clicking hard drive is a dreaded sound that you hopefully won't ever have to hear (and if you do, hopefully you have backed up your data). A failing hard drive can make a variety of sounds and to post them all would take a while. In most cases, a clicking drive will sound something like this. 

That clicking sound is indicative of physical hardware failure on the disk. It can happen anytime and can happen to a drive that is brand new or one that is really ancient. It is important that you immediately turn the computer off and stop using the drive. If the problem is a head crash, then continuing to use the drive in this state can cause permanent data loss. 

If you have experienced this problem, contact ReWave for free help. We can diagnose your problem with a free evaluation which won't cost you anything. We have over 16 years of experience recovering data from clicking hard drives. We offer both desktop data recovery and laptop data recovery.

Now for the joke of the day:

A duck walks into a drugstore and asks for a tube of ChapStick. The cashier says to the duck, “That’ll be $1.49.” The duck replies, “Put it on my bill!”

RAID configured External Hard Drives

Today’s topic is large capacity external hard drives including network attached storage (NAS) units. These type of units have become increasingly popular because of their large capacity. They range from 500 GB to 4 TB and are manufactured by many companies including Lacie,Buffalo Technology, and Maxtor.

Something to remember is that these units have multiple disk drives inside that are configured using RAID technology. This is what enables them to offer such high capacities. Most of them offer users a choice when configuring the unit for the first time. RAID 0 offers high performance, but is very risky. RAID 0 stripes data across all of the disk drives, and if one drive fails the data can be lost forever. ReWave gets tons of these units in every week where the user has lost their data due to NAS failure. In most cases, these units come preconfigured as RAID 0. It is important to consider using a different RAID level unless you are certain you can perform regular backups. Most of the time, one of the disk drives fail and it becomes necessary to repair the drive in the clean room before the data can be recovered.

If you purchase one of these units, you may want to seriously consider changing the RAID level during configuration (don’t try to change it after you have been using it for a while unless you backup first!) Depending on your particular unit, your choices probably include RAID 1 (mirroring), RAID 5 (striping with parity), or JBOD (just a bunch of disks). RAID 1 essentially cuts your disk space in half but provides full security by mirroring your data. Although not as safe as RAID 1, RAID 5 can sustain the failure of one disk and allows you to use most of the capacity of the unit.

The bottom line is- if you must use RAID 0, please remember to perform regular backups!!!


Now for the joke of the day: 

There are 2 cowboys in the kitchen. Which one is the real cowboy? The one on the range.

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