Replacing a Dead NAS Drive and Recovering the Data

Replacing a Dead NAS Drive and Recovering the Data
January 29, 2025

Loyal readers will know that I’ve relied upon a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive for many years. First, let’s talk about NAS drives in general and then I’ll talk about where they fit into my workspace. The short answer is that a NAS drive is a computer that serves as a hard drive. Most NAS drives include more than one hard drive inside a single enclosure and they can be configured so that if a drive fails, it can simply be replaced without loss of data. The NAS is connected to your network so that all computer connected to your network (with appropriate permissions) can access the NAS and the data on it. Some NAS drives even allow the drive to be accessed remotely so that you can get to your data no matter where you are located.

My First Two NAS Drives

I got my first NAS drive in 2007 and it served me well for several years. At one point the power supply inside of it failed and I had to replace that power supply. I then replaced it in January 2016 with the Asustor AS5110T, shown below.

Asustor AS5110T NAS Drive

It contained ten drive bays and I configured it so that if any one drive failed, I could simply replace it with no data loss. Unfortunately disaster struck in September 2018 and two drives failed at the same time. I wrote about that in When Your Backup Plan Fails, You Pay Dearly for Recovery. It was a very expensive process and I ended up replacing all ten drives just in case there were others near failure. When I configured it again, I set it up so that multiple drives could fail without data loss.

Backing Up For More Protection

I added another layer of protection in 2022 when I used IDrive to back up the data on my computers as well as the Asustor NAS drive every night. I wrote about setting that up in Use IDrive to Safely Backup Your Data to the Cloud. Now that it has been in place for three years, I find it well worth the annual cost to know that my data is safe!

That got put to the test recently when the NAS drive failed on January 2, 2025. I alluded to this failure in recent posts Foster’s Dream Computer 2024 Is Hard at Work and Loading Software On Foster’s Dream Computer 2024. Thankfully it happened after I already had the new computer up and running as it made recovering from the failure much easier.

My first goal was to try and revive the old NAS drive. The first test was removing all of the drives to see if it would boot. That didn’t work. In talking to Asustor technical support, they suggested that the CMOS battery inside of the NAS drive may need to be replaced. Of course the CMOS battery was located so deep inside the drive that I had to take it completely apart. I had to watch a YouTube video in Italian just to figure out where it was located! Below you’ll see a photo of the battery with the disassembled drive behind it.

CMOS battery from NAS drive

The CMOS battery was not the solution and it was determined that the motherboard in the NAS drive had gone bad. While it may have been possible to replace it, it was more cost effective to purchase a new NAS drive. I’ll discuss the new NAS drive, but first let’s talk about recovering the data.

Recovering the Data

It would take some time to get a new NAS drive in place and I needed access to some of that data right away. Remember, IDrive backed it up to the cloud each night. I looked in my IDrive account and identified a few folders that were the most important and downloaded them to the hard drive on my new computer. Yes, that hard drive was being backed up to IDrive each night as well. I found there were fewer than ten files lost due to the death of the drive. Those were files created between the middle of the night backup and the drive dying later that day. The really good news is that the files lost were not needed going forward so it really wasn’t a loss at all.

The New NAS Drive

I decided that my new NAS drive would come from another provider as there were always little things that frustrated me about the Asustor unit. After studying various options, I went with the Synology 5-bay DiskStation DS1522+ pictured below.

Synology 5-Bay DiskStation DS1522+ NAS Drive

One big difference you’ll notice is that it only holds five drives in comparison to the ten drives in the previous NAS. Since I’m going to use the hard drives I already had, this does decrease the maximum capacity considerably. But it is still more than enough for my current data and I will consider buying new larger capacity drives in the future to add more capacity.

It took a couple of weeks to receive the drive after ordering because it had been out of stock. The most time consuming part of setup was removing five drives from the trays in the old NAS drive and putting them into trays for the new NAS drive. It wasn’t difficult other than finding the right screwdriver to use on the small screws. Once the drives slid into the DiskStation, I turned it on and did the configuration. This might have taken 10-15 minutes. After configuration, it did want to format and index the drives which took several hours. No problem, it just let it run overnight.

The next day I downloaded all of the folders of data from IDrive except the ones I had already downloaded to my desktop computer. The last step was transferring the other folders from my desktop computer to the DiskStation. Those processes were time consuming so I tried to do it when it wouldn’t disrupt my work. When all data was in place, I set up IDrive to backup the DiskStation to the cloud every night.

Just to be safe, I have not yet deleted the data from the old NAS drive in my IDrive account. This means the account is very near capacity. In the next few days, I’ll verify that all data is safely in place and then I’ll delete the old data on IDrive and I’ll have plenty of spare capacity again.

In Closing

Now that I’ve replaced my primary computer, numerous accessories and my NAS drive; I’m hoping that I’ll be set for a few years. Yes, I may replace the drives in the DiskStation with newer and higher capacity drives. This is a fairly simple process if I replace them one drive at a time. Because of the was the NAS drive is configured, it simply rebuilds the data on the new drive added. Once it is rebuilt, you can replace the next drive. Repeat this until all drives are replaced and you’ve got newer drives (less likely to fail) as well as more space to add data.

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Foster D. Coburn III

Foster D. Coburn III built his first Web site in 1995 and he has been working exclusively in WordPress since 2013. He has used the Divi theme exclusively since 2015. Earlier in his career he was the author of 13 best-selling books on CorelDRAW and has been a contributor to numerous technology and graphics-related magazines. Foster has taken many projects, including this Web site, from the early design stage through to a finished piece. He has been a featured speaker at many graphics conferences.
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