NAS Drives and Data Recovery

[lazytown]

Hi folks,
I have a 1TB NAS Drive (Freecom Datatank) the has gone titsup, the nas is still under warranty, but I have permission from Freecom to break the seal and remove the drives to try and recover the data (approx 700GB). The drive is made up of 2x 500GB Sata Drives which are setup as RAID 0 (striping). I also think that one of the drives maybe faulty and that is what has caused it to go titsup.
The Filesystem they use is ReiserFS.
Anyone got any ideas on how I can get the data off the drives before returning it for replacement.

[blueivy]

Hi folks,
I have a 1TB NAS Drive (Freecom Datatank) the has gone titsup, the nas is still under warranty, but I have permission from Freecom to break the seal and remove the drives to try and recover the data (approx 700GB). The drive is made up of 2x 500GB Sata Drives which are setup as RAID 0 (striping). I also think that one of the drives maybe faulty and that is what has caused it to go titsup.
The Filesystem they use is ReiserFS.
Anyone got any ideas on how I can get the data off the drives before returning it for replacement.

If one of the drives is faulty then you will be not be able to normally recover the data. RAID 0 does not provide you with any redundancy. You should have used RAID 1 but that would only have given you 500GB.

"RAID 0 (striped disks) distributes data across several disks in a way that gives improved speed and full capacity, but all data on all disks will be lost if any one disk fails." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

If it's not the drives then the NAS probably uses standard Linux RAID (as it's the cheapest option) so you should (stress should not can) be able to mount it under Linux RAID normally.

[emb123]

Only thing I could add to BlueIvy's comment really is to suggest that if you are confident that one of the drives is defective, then depending upon the nature of the defect it MAY be possible to repair the defective drive. The strongest likelihood is however that you will not be able to do this.

If the mechanical part of the drive is fine and it is only the drive electronics which are faulty then it may be possible to purchase an absolutely identical drive with known to be functional electronics and swap over the pcb.

Even then, the rather odd choice of File System is not going to make life any easier.

I think that you are basically up that proverbial creek without a paddle.

It depends how important the data is to you. Provided the physical structure of the platters is absolutely perfectly intact, the data should be recoverable, but only by seriously expensive professional data recovery services, who would rebuild a new drive around your current platter and then recover what they could. I would expect that you would be looking at a fee substantially above £1K-£1.5K.

[lazytown]

Hi Blueivy & emb123,
Thanks for trying to help, I have already tried to mount the drives under linux without any success. also when the one of the drives sits there going tick tick tick tick, then it is a pretty good indication it is ed or on its way out.
I think you are right emb, I am up the creek on this one, also because RAID is involved with the drives then I suspect it would cost a bit more than 1.5K to recover......
I was just hoping someone else may have had and any ideas.
Again Thanks

[Sapphire2803]

Ok, now I'm gonna make myself sound insane, but I don't care. Put the dodgy drive in the freezer for 24 hours, then plug it back into the NAS and if it works go for the important stuff first. You won't get long.

Make sure you seal it up in a couple of ziplock bags to prevent condensation.

If you're gonna use RAID 0 then buy two Units and back up once a week at least.

[blueivy]

Hi Blueivy & emb123,
Thanks for trying to help, I have already tried to mount the drives under linux without any success. also when the one of the drives sits there going tick tick tick tick, then it is a pretty good indication it is ed or on its way out.
I think you are right emb, I am up the creek on this one, also because RAID is involved with the drives then I suspect it would cost a bit more than 1.5K to recover......
I was just hoping someone else may have had and any ideas.
Again Thanks

When a drive goes tick tick tick, it's gone.

I got a price for drive recovery for a client some time back and it was £500 to look at the drive and recover the data if they could. If not then it would be much more expensive (rising to at least £1k) as the process is much more involved. However, I believe the £500 would be returned (so it was a money back guarantee). Depending on which type of recovery you are going for, RAID shouldn't make any difference to the recovery price.

I've never heard what Sapphire said, but you've got nothing to lose so I'd give it a go. I did look it up and found this and they suggest two hours in a bag in the freezer so I would maybe give that a try first and then if it doesn't work you could try 24 hours.

My advice would be if you need to store 700GB of data, buy two 1TB drives and pop them into your NAS device and use RAID 1. If you really need separate backups then buy a spare.

[lazytown]

Well the drive is now in the freezer, got to be worth a try, different folks have had different success rates using this method.

My advice would be if you need to store 700GB of data, buy two 1TB drives and pop them into your NAS device and use RAID 1. If you really need separate backups then buy a spare.

Hindsight is a worderful thing.
Thankfully the nas is still under warranty and they will replace it for me, which I think I will only use for keeping backups on in the future.
Going to build a fileserver within my VMWare environment to keep my data on and back that up to the nas drive.
So now to purchase some new drives for my ESX Server to handle any new data.

[blueivy]

Well the drive is now in the freezer, got to be worth a try, different folks have had different success rates using this method.



Hindsight is a worderful thing.
Thankfully the nas is still under warranty and they will replace it for me, which I think I will only use for keeping backups on in the future.
Going to build a fileserver within my VMWare environment to keep my data on and back that up to the nas drive.
So now to purchase some new drives for my ESX Server to handle any new data.

Streaming data, particularly a lot of it, from ESXi (I assuming you're using ESXi and not ESX?) slows down the server it is on considerably. I put this down to the virtual software NIC's in the abstraction layer. The box I am using isn't underpowered by any means (2 x 2.5Ghz Quad Core, 13GB RAM, 2TB disk space) but still the server can suffer badly.

I am about to build a RAID5 NAS box with 1.5TB of disk space to try and properly backup the ESXi server and to also try and find out what works best for streaming data off of the server. If you get there first and find more out, please let me know!

Just something to think about. You may or may not experience any of the slowdown at all.

[lazytown]

Streaming data, particularly a lot of it, from ESXi (I assuming you're using ESXi and not ESX?) slows down the server it is on considerably. I put this down to the virtual software NIC's in the abstraction layer. The box I am using isn't underpowered by any means (2 x 2.5Ghz Quad Core, 13GB RAM, 2TB disk space) but still the server can suffer badly.

I am about to build a RAID5 NAS box with 1.5TB of disk space to try and properly backup the ESXi server and to also try and find out what works best for streaming data off of the server. If you get there first and find more out, please let me know!

Just something to think about. You may or may not experience any of the slowdown at all.

I presume you are using sata drives on you ESXi box, unless you are buying the more expensive ones with higher disk speeds then that may well be causing the slow down for streaming data.

Because of the problems I am having it is causing me too look at my whole system including the way I have ESXi configured.

I think I will probably look at mirroring the drives. (Cheapest Option)
2 x 500GB Raid 1 - Keep all systems on this. (Gives me 500GB Usable space)
2x 1TB RAID 1 - Keep the Data On.(Gives me 1TB Usable space)

Being RAID 1 it should read data more quickly.

Alternatively I could put another controller card in the box and Go for Raid 1 for system drives and RAID 5 for Data
2 x 500GB - RAID 1 ( Gives me 500GB Usable space)
3 x 750GB - RAID 5 (Gives me 1.5TB Usable Space)

Then using my NAS Drive when I get it back to backup the ESXi Box.

[blueivy]

I presume you are using sata drives on you ESXi box, unless you are buying the more expensive ones with higher disk speeds then that may well be causing the slow down for streaming data.

The RAID in this server only supports 150MBps SATA drives. I'm sure there is a RAID out there supporting 300MBps for SATA but I haven't seen it yet. I'll need to get the faster SAS drives to see the speed increase for that.

Being RAID 1 it should read data more quickly.

If you've got (good) hardware RAID, I've never really seen much of an improvement of RAID 1 over RAID 5. If you're running large and heavily used database or other write intensive applications then yes, RAID 1 will be quicker for you as there are less computations to do. But normal day to day running of a system RAID 5 is fast enough.

I think I will probably look at mirroring the drives. (Cheapest Option)
2 x 500GB Raid 1 - Keep all systems on this. (Gives me 500GB Usable space)
2x 1TB RAID 1 - Keep the Data On.(Gives me 1TB Usable space)

Alternatively I could put another controller card in the box and Go for Raid 1 for system drives and RAID 5 for Data
2 x 500GB - RAID 1 ( Gives me 500GB Usable space)
3 x 750GB - RAID 5 (Gives me 1.5TB Usable Space)

If you're intent on going RAID 1 then I'd stick with the second option assuming your RAID card is proper hardware RAID with BBWC (otherwise you will see a greater speed decrease for RAID 5). Gives you more options to expand at a later date should you want to add more disks.

We may be getting off-topic slightly here :-)

[Sapphire2803]