Reasons for NAS hard drive failures
There is a variety of reasons for failed hard drives in QNAP NAS systems:
Wear and tear of the hard drive
Generally speaking, NAS systems operate non-stop, even though the contained hard drives are often not optimized for long term usage. Frequent write- and read-operations can cause normal wear and tear to occur much sooner than expected and lead to a failure of one or more hard drives. Wear and tear is one of the most common reasons for failure or defects of physical or electronic hard drives components.
Incorrect handling
Sometimes QNAP NAS can already suffer damages on their route of transport caused by incorrect handling or physical influences (drop, shock, heavy vibrations). These can negatively influence the life span of the integrated hard drives and can lead to mechanical defects (write-/read-heads, surface damages).
Electronic damages caused by over-voltage
If a QNAP NAS is non-stop operating, this also means that it needs a continuous power supply. In case of a storm or lightning, over-voltage based damages on the NAS itself or the hard drives can occur. Another scenario are wrong or defective power supplies, that can cause over-voltage.
Thermal factors
QNAP NAS can overheat very quickly, if not properly cooled. Hard drives are very prone to damages caused by temperature fluctuations (material expansion, change of the height of the air cushion). This can result in grave mechanical defects.
Other causes for data loss of QNAP NAS
Lost data after a firmware update
QNAP provides the latest firmware updates for their NAS servers. The administrator gets notified via the web interface that a new firmware version for his QNAP NAS is available. In some cases, the firmware update can lead to a loss of data.
Deleted RAID configuration of the QNAP NAS
When configuring a new RAID set-up (e. g. RAID 0 to RAID 1), the previous configuration of the NAS will be deleted, the hard drives formatted and a new volume and file system created. Thereby all shares or files will be deleted. Additionally, if new data is being saved onto the NAS, the previous raw data gets gradually overwritten.
Thin Provisioning
QNAP NAS RAID-systems don't use the standardized Linux thin provisioning, but a proprietary adapted thin provisioning from QNAP. Attingo has developed special procedures to recover data.
Possible Error messages from QNAP NAS systems
- VMFS: Warning: Lun ID mismatch
- Unable to find file "filename".vmdk
- "file system corrupt"
- mount: unknown file system type
- mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0, missing codepage or helper program, or other error
- WARNING: Unrecognised segment type tier-thin-poolError: [RAID5 Disk Volume: Drive 1 2 3 4] Examination failed.
- Error: [RAID6 Disk Volume] RAID Recovery failed.
- Information: [RAID0 Disk Volume] Drive added into the volume.
- Information: [RAID1 Disk Volume] Start examination.
- Information: [RAID5 Disk Volume] Start rebuilding.
- Information: [RAID6 Disk Volume] Start re-syncing.
- Warning: [RAID10 Disk Volume: Drive 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8] RAID device in degraded mode.
- Warning: [RAID Disk Volume] The file system is not clean. It is suggested that you go to [Storage Manager] to run Check File System.
Damage limitation with QNAP NAS systems
- No restarts, rebuilds or chkdsk! That may have fatal consequences.
- Avoid new installations and don't save new data on the NAS.
- Remove the hard drives from the QNAP NAS and label them with their correct slot position.
- Tell us the exact model name of your QNAP NAS, the capacity of the hard drives and the NAS system configuration.
