Buffalo NAS - Need help urgently

traco

Does anyone have a Buffalo DriveStation Quattro Turbo USB HD-QSSU2 found this one on ebay which looks like our although the part number on ours says HDQU.OTSU2.

Basically one disk was showing like it had failed so IT guys went to replace it, double checked connections first and when repowered all failed so it looks like control board.

Buffalo are not able to help and need to get data off the Raid drives. If one is available somewhere I would consider buying or open to any other suggestions.

BTW - I am not IT expert so we have our IT contractors looking at this also but figured I would start looking for other options also.

Thanks

bhickey

Have you tried to access either of the disks directly or by putting them in a USB caddy?

traco

The guys are trying to hook the disks up idvidually to a ubuntu system to see if they can access them but I am not sure how that will work as it was a 4 disk raid system with the disks all mirrored. In theory there should be 3 good disks in there but I dont really understand how the disk architecture is created and if they can be read stand alone.

I was thinking that the quickest simplest solution might be to get my hands on the same system and place the disks straight into that and get back running as quickly as possible.

bhickey

Forgot to ask, were you using RAID and if so what type?

traco

It was 4 disks all replicated so drive showed as a single disk, there was no data stripping as far as I know. It was supposed to be the most secure so would that be RAID 1 config using 4 disks?

bhickey

traco wrote: »

It was 4 disks all replicated so drive showed as a single disk, there was no data stripping as far as I know. It was supposed to be the most secure so would that be RAID 1 config using 4 disks?

If the total drive size was equal to the size of 1 disk than that would be RAID1 across 4 disks which sounds strange. Anyway if it was RAID1 then I'd think you should be able to have a look at each disk on its own. The most important thing is to figure out for definite how it was setup.

rolion

under no circumstances remove the drive AND 'forget' to insert it back under same physical / logical configuration...RAID controller will read the RAID5 configuration off the drives and if one is not properly setup,the config will fail with the risk of data losing getting higher.

it is RAID0 (stripping with no mirror or Just a Bunch Of Disks - JBOD) then you can say bye bye to data...you can recover something but mostly not inteligible...just curious:who set it up as RAID0 !? never use it myself...some suppliers advertise the NAS as being 2Tb,where are two drives 1Tb each set in raid0 / jbod giving you speed and not redundancy but fools you in thinking that you have lots of space...

i had a simillar case with a server and RAID5,where 2 out of 4 drives failed and i had to bring it to a data recovery company and they did it for me,in 2 days and at what cost...what a cost ! !

traco

The guys that set it up are the guys that have it. It was set up as the smallest amount of disk space with the most duplication / redundancy as that was the reason we put it in. Not proving a succes though at the moment.

@rolion, I would appreciate if you could PM me the details of that recovery company in case I need to go that route.

In theory we should have 3 intact disks which are replicas of each other so fingers crossed. Hence the search for an identical NAs so that I can out the disks in and get back up. Pity that one on ebay is in Vietnam

bhickey

traco wrote: »

It was set up as the smallest amount of disk space with the most duplication / redundancy

Well look they should be able to tell you (and you need to know) for sure what exact type of RAID was used. If RAID1 then I'd connect up one of the drives and see if I can read the files on it.

traco

Thanks for all the input guys. Looking at online backup solutions now so that I run that also everynight from the server.