Buffalo Forums
Products => Storage => : a1future July 30, 2013, 04:18:34 AM
-
I have a 6 bay NAS with 6 x 4TB HDDs in it. RAID5 is configured. Files are shared and accessed by about 100 Windows PC in the network.
Now suppose if some problem happens with the NAS casing, can I bring these HDDs out from the NAS - plug them into a different Windows/Linux machine and read the data?
What is the process to do so?
-
Those drives have a complete OS on them which includes the ability to read the data. First things first, RAID is fault tolerance but is not a backup.
If the chassis fails in some way with a catastrophic hardware failure, the ideal way to recover data is to replace the chassis (probably under warranty?) and migrate drives.
That said, if during a catastrophic failure, bad data is written across your array, then you can, with a single hardware failure, be in a data loss situation (this is not nearly so common as drive failures, which is what makes RAID worth doing). Plugging them into a windows machine will definitely not work. Mounting them in a linux environment may be theoretically possible but I've never seen it successfully done, and it would take some serious know-how to even attempt it, and may not ever work.
The simplest and most reliable way to be able to read your data in the event of full unit failure is to have a backup, replace the chassis, and restore from backup.
24TB is a lot of space - you can manage your backups however you like - if you have users saving their lolcat collections to these folders, maybe it isn't hugely important to back them up. The backup function in the TS has you backing up shares rather than drives, so maybe you create shares that have the really important stuff on them and you have other shares you run without a backup.
-
Backup the data to a USB HDD formatted to XFS, if the unit fails attach the USB HDD to a linux PC -> Done.