Synology, QNAP, Buffalo, WD My Cloud, Netgear ReadyNAS — the boxes Scotland trusts with everything from family archives to whole small businesses. When one dies, drops a volume or greets you with a blinking amber light, remember the golden intake rule: the disks come to Edinburgh, labelled by bay. The box can stay home.
$ edr connecting…
Inside every NAS, your files sit under a stack: physical disks at the bottom, then software RAID (mdadm on most brands, Synology’s SHR hybrids on theirs), then a volume manager, then a Linux file system — ext4 or, increasingly, btrfs with its own snapshot logic. A failure at any layer takes the share offline, and the recovery must walk the whole stack back up: image the disks, reassemble the RAID mathematics, reconstruct the volume, then repair the file system on the copy. It’s why ‘just plug a NAS drive into Windows’ shows an unreadable disk — and why the bench reads them natively.
Disk death leads, naturally — NAS units run 24/7, and their drives age together, so the second-disk-during-rebuild story is a NAS story too. Firmware updates gone wrong can orphan a healthy volume from its own operating system. Power events corrupt the RAID metadata or the file system while every disk tests fine. And — the modern one — ransomware reaches NAS shares exactly as it reaches any mapped drive, with internet-exposed boxes attacked directly; if there’s a note where your files were, the ransomware page is your route. In every flavour: don’t reinstall the NAS OS, don’t accept a ‘repair’ you don’t understand, and don’t rebuild. Label, pull, send.
Resist the console's own repair suggestions until the data's safety is understood — some paths rebuild the volume by sacrificing what was on it. Power down, pull the disks noting bay order, and send them. SHR and btrfs structures reconstruct cleanly from images when nothing's been 'repaired' over them.
Windows will offer to initialize it — decline — because NAS disks carry Linux RAID and file systems your PC doesn't speak. Singly connected, a member of an array shows fragments at best. Native reading of mdadm, SHR, ext4 and btrfs is exactly what the bench is for.
Almost never — the data and the array's structure live entirely on the disks. Labelled disks travel lighter and safer than a box with a PSU. Exception worth mentioning when you call: some encrypted volumes, where keys or the unit itself matter.
A free diagnostic first, always — then a fixed written quote before any work begins. No surprises on the invoice, because there's no invoice until you've approved the number.
A representative selection of related work from the bench.
Getting a device onto this bench only takes two moves, and the clock on your free look starts the moment it lands.
Strip out cables, caddies and power bricks — none of it helps — wrap the device so it can't shift in transit, and either post it insured to 83 Princes Street, Edinburgh EH2 2ER or bring it in yourself. Tuck a note of what happened in with it, and enclose the shipping form if you've printed one.
Arrival gets confirmed, the diagnostic runs at no cost to you, and the call that follows names the fault and states a fixed price. The bench stays idle on your device until you say go.
Free diagnostic first. Every disk imaged before any rebuild — the rebuild is usually what finishes a struggling NAS off.