One of the lads at work gave me his old, 8 year old NAS, I took it home booted, configured etc and it's been working fine as cold storage.
The other week I come downstairs to see it's turned off, thought it was weird, turned it back on, accessed it, all good. Came downstairs the other day and it's off again but now won't boot, has power as 1 light on LAN 1 flickers on and off, every now and then I press the power button, the power light flashes on, CPU fan tries to spin and it just dies.
To top it off, I pulled all the WD NAS drives out, put in an external reader and they appear as empty and inaccessible even though there is about 200GB of data on one of the 5 drives...
Anyone have any ideas what the issue could be? How I can recover the data? Moving to cloud storage after this.
To top it off, I pulled all the WD NAS drives out, put in an external reader and they appear as empty and inaccessible even though there is about 200GB of data on one of the 5 drives...
If you were looking on a PC, they would look empty. Windows (and Macs) don't support the linux file systems used by the NAS.
Are you sure the 200GB of data is all one one drive? Normally the NAS would be set up with RAID, so the data would be spread across all the disks.
How I can recover the data? Moving to cloud storage after this.
There are a couple of options here.
Repair the PSU
Purchase adapter/docks (or enclosures) so you can connect the disks to a Windows PC. Use R-Studio or similar RAID recovery software. https://www.r-studio.com/
Find a RAID recovery service, and have them off-load the data.
Purchase a compatible used NAS (another Pioneer, a Pro 6, or Ultra 6), and migrate the disks
The PSU repair would be the cheapest option, getting a used NAS is probably the most expensive. Though data recovery might be more expensive (option 2 isn't that difficult, and likely much cheaper than option 3).
You actually don't have to install a new PSU if your goal is simpy data recovery. If you have a standard ATXV12 power supply available, you can connect it externally. You may need one or more 4-pin Molex Y cables and/or SATA to Molex adapters, and you should use masking tape to cover the gap where the cables go in and the orignal PSU fan outlet to allow the air to flow over the drives and motherboard as best it can using just the main and CPU fans.
