Buffalo Forums

Hi,

I think I must be the most unlucky person in the world when it comes to NAS drives. I am up to my 6th Buffalo Linkstation in 5 years. They seem to just fry themselves after about 10-14 months.

** Sorry long rant starts here, real questions at the bottom, feel free to skip ahead! **

In the past I had been buying the cheap linkstation versions but after another failure where I had to spend days recovering my data I decided to buy the LS-WVL 6TB ( 2x 3TB) LinkStation Pro Duo NAS and set it up as RAID1.
I assumed if I spent £300 on one of these it may outlast the normal 14 month period but unfortunately I was wrong.

It turned itself off the other day and if I turn it on I just get the flashing blue power light. Contacting Buffalo Tech Support they gave me instructions to get it into Emergency Mode which was:
- Power the unit down (disconnect the power by pulling out the power cable while the unit is ON).
- Reboot the unit, if the power led is still flashing more than 70 second's from the start, disconnect the power immediately and retry.
- Do this until the unit's power led is constant within 60 second's after the start and the unit is in EM.
Please note it can take a number of attempts to bring the unit to EM mode.

It took me 34 tries of this and nothing. Reading on here I got different advice about holding down the Function button whilst booting. This worked first time.

Then the advice was to download the firmware updater, manually edit the ini file and set NoFormatting = 0 and Debug = 1. Then in debug mode to select 'Delete user data partition'. They then went on to state:

'The firmware update process itself does not affect data stored on the unit'.

After doing all this and running the update the updater gave me a message that the Partition is missing and it must delete all data which, the more astute of you is not what the Buffalo support email said.

After some online research it is obvious that the email from support was wrong. I then rang them back and they said that it would delete the data and there is nothing you can do. As the RAID1 controller had failed it is now impossible to ever recover the data off the drives.

** Rant ends here **

So please can I ask for some help. Can anyone tell me:
•   I asked tech support if I bought a new NAS can I just put the drives in and they said no. Is this because the RAID1 data is stored on the drives?
•   I have read that the if I get a SATA to USB cable I can take either drive and attach it to the PC directly. Then there are several software products out there (for about £50-£100) that can read the format the Buffalo uses. Is this correct? If so any recommendations?
•   Going forward is there a solution that mirrors the data on both drives not using RAID and storing the data in a windows readable format? It seems completely stupid that you protect against drive failure at the cost of using an intermediary (the RAID controller) that is even more prone to failure than the drives.


I do not care about getting the linkstation working again, I think I am just going to bin it and pay for some sort of cloud storage. It has to be cheaper than buying a new drive each year and then spending days getting the data off it. Also the data I have lost is only about a months worth as I have had such a bad time in the past with these that I store the data on the NAS, about once a month or so copy it to one of my local PCs and then every 2-3 months copy it to an external portable drive.

Thanks for your help,
  -Stewart