Buffalo Forums

I have a 2 month old Terastation ES (TS-XE8.0TL/R5) with 8TB of storage.  It is configured for RAID5, using all 4 drives in the array - no hot spare.  Three days ago, I arrived in the office to find 3 drives listed as bad... solid red LEDs, with "drive failed" and "array mount failure" messages.  I find it hard to believe that all 3 drives could fail at once, so I assume some internal hardware (RAID controller) may be at fault.

At first, Buffalo Support at first told me that they would send 3 replacement drives... and that the RAID5 array would rebuild.  Doubtful.  When I pressed them on the internal hardware issue, they decided to send a replacement NAS.  To see if the NAS is at fault (and not the drives), I plan to put all 4 of my "old" drives in the new unit.  Will it recognize the drives and access the array without rebuilding?

If support is sending an identical NAS (TS-XE), and the firmware partitions on your existing HDDs didn't become corrupt during the error that caused the RAID mount failure, then swapping out your current HDDs into the replacement chassis should not cause a RAID rebuild in the replacement chassis. When you swap HDDs, be sure to keep the same order of HDD locations.

Thanks for the response.  Buffalo tech support informed me today that replacement ES units are on backorder until 3/15!  They offered to send a TS III, but drives are not compatible.  I'll need to recover my data through other means.  I (and the tech I chatted with today) suspect it's the RAID controller and not the drives.  Is there a method to "image" each drive (in the same order) and copy the image to the new TS III disks?  Or, should I invest in recovery software and try to pull off what I can to copy to the new array on the TS III?

there are a few ways to attempt to extract the data off the HDDs, but they are complex, could cause further issues with the data, and void the product warranty. There are good articles at http://buffalo.nas-central.org (not affiliated with Buffalo Technology), detailing ways of extracting data from RAID 5. Buffalo Technology does not endorse or suggest anyone uses any methods of extracting data from a failed RAID unit, except for using specific Buffalo Technology approved Data Recovery centers.

I certainly understand that a single NAS - even with the redundant capabilities of RAID 5 - is not backup.  However, a device at its price point certainly should function for more than 28 days without massive failure.  Poor manufacturing and/or quality control is not network attached storage - it's a network attached bit bucket!

Marcus256, what is the RMA number for the replacement TS-XE?