An Edinburgh architecture firm’s NETGEAR ReadyNAS Duo — a two-bay RAID 1 mirror holding their design projects, CAD files and client documentation — showed the unit’s grimmest signal: two red lights, bad sectors on both drives at once. The firm did what feels logical: fitted replacement drives and started a rebuild. It failed — and worse, the attempt overwrote portions of the RAID metadata on the way down. No external backup stood behind any of it.
Individual diagnostics split the mirror’s illness in two: one original drive carried extensive bad sectors, the other head degradation — aged twins failing together, as mirrored pairs bought together tend to. Both were imaged sector by sector with hardware that routes around unreadable regions rather than hammering them, preserving everything the damaged rebuild hadn’t already claimed. The RAID 1 was then reassembled virtually, drawing on the healthiest surviving copy of each region across the two images — the quiet advantage of a mirror, even a wounded one — and the ReadyNAS’s ext4 file system repaired on top to restore the directory tree. Extraction ran to the firm’s priorities: live design projects and CAD first, client files next, the archive after, with partially damaged files reconstructed where their pieces allowed.
96% of the data returned within five days — every critical design project and client file among it — on new external storage, and the firm resumed work with two recommendations ringing: RAID is availability, not backup; and a failed array’s worst enemy is the confident rebuild. The metadata that DIY attempt overwrote is precisely where the missing 4% went — an honest cost worth publishing, because it’s the avoidable part of this story.
Two red lights on a two-bay NAS means both halves of your safety net are tearing — and a rebuild is the worst next move. The NAS page covers what to do instead: power down, label, send. The first step never changes: a free diagnostic and a fixed written quote before anything is at stake — or call 0131 202 0491 and describe what happened.