Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems NAS drive selection help

My piece of advice, which I have written before, but will write it again having just had first hand experience of NAS enclosure failure is...

Don't assume that built in RAID will make your collection safe. Many NAS boxes use file or RAID systems that are proprietary to the particular model. So if the NAS enclosure fails, you will still have great difficulty (or it may be economically impossible) to recover data on your drives.

So when selecting a NAS solution, make sure that a RAID disc can be easily removed and recovered in another device (ie a PC that you own), or buy a spare NAS enclosure, which is what I did very cheaply when my HP Media Vault went end of life.

After returning from the HH2 weekend, my HP Media Vault NAS box failed to boot. I was able to remove the mirrored disc and place it in my spare NAS enclosure and copy the data to my PC. I could not put it direct in my PC as it uses a proprietary version of the ReiserFS disc format, so even if I did have a Linux box, I still would not have been able to read the data. After swapping over the system disc, it transpired that it was not a drive failure, but the enclosure had 'failed'. So my bacon was saved by having the spare identical enclosure. Further investigation on the enclosure tracked the issue down to corruption of the NVRAM, possibly due to the battery backup failing during an extended period of being powered down. A reset bought the NAS box back to life and it is now my spare, so the failure was not catastrophic. But having a spare enclosure, I was able to get back up and running quickly and without risk to my important data, instead of risking the data by performing potentially data threatening diagnostics and recovery options which you don't normally test except in a disaster recovery situation.