Firmware Update Wipes Out Volume

Turns out I did not need data recovery. I have a hardware issue with slot 3. 

I could easily recreate the data / volume loss by putting a drive in slot 3 and rebooting. Upon booting, drives 3 and 4 behave like they need to be resynced... so with 2 drives down I am beyond the 1 spare drive tolerance of RAID5. So the volume is gone... but remove the drive from slot 3 and *presto* the volume is back but in a degraded state.

I tried 7 different drives in slot 3 and encountered the same scenario. I used 2 WD Enterprise drives, one WD Red drive, and 4 destkop drives. The NAS would not recognize any drive via hot swap but the moment you reboot and come back up, 3 and 4 do their weirdness, volume is offline and I am back to the "data loss". Pop the drive out, reboot and back to degraded volume. So there really was no need for data recovery had I figured out ahead of time that pulling drive 3 out would have 'fixed' my volume. 

Eventually support came to the same conclusion that I have a hardware problem and I am in the process of an RMA.