Greetings Gurus,

Hoping for some help recovering data after last night's NAS crash. It's a Synology DS212 with a pair of Seagate 7200RPM 3TB drives (model ST3000DM001). These components were purchased new June 2012. Drives are separate volumes so no RAID in the picture and no indication this was coming from frequently run diagnostics.

Only one of the HDDs was busy as source/target for a video encoding session. Heard a bit of a "clunk" followed by beeping at ~1 second intervals and that's all she wrote. Now neither drive spins up. They just beep and I have verified the sound is emanating from the drives and not the NAS.

I've tried spinning up the drives using other hardware, to no avail. I'm going to pick up an identical drive and attempt to reproduce the problem. Really hope it breaks, implicating the NAS, but I'm not optimistic. My thinking is that the clunk before the crash was the sound of HDD heads somehow being forced into a precarious position. How else to explain 2 drives dead in the same instant? Anything's possible... but even I am not that unlucky.

All input is welcome. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

How was it setup? RAID 0, RAID 1, JBOD, etc?
What is the value of the data? If anything at all, don't waste time and money messing around with it and get it assessed by a pro before further irreversible damage is caused.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Poor man's RAID 1. JBOD with a nightly rsync.



Majority of the data is replaceable... at the expense of time. Most encoded video and ripped audio. Certainly nothing I want to spend a fortune recovering.

Well it's definitely the drives. A new barracuda 3TB installed in the NAS with no problems. Although I do think whatever happened to the drives was induced by the NAS.

I put one of the drives in a external enclosure and gave it a little nudge at power on. The drive spun up! However, now it cycles through spin up, some noisy head movement and spin down.

Read with some interest a thread where a member ran an open HDD for a solid month before tiring of the experiment. Would there be any upside to popping the top if I'm ready to write the drive and its warranty replacement off?

Still have one more chance to recover since the 2nd drive is a replica.

The plot thickens. The brand new barracuda drive failed and is exhibiting the same symptoms. Obviously the NAS is getting RMA'd but what could it be doing to these drives that has caused 3 to break in as many days?

One would think it would be electronic, rather than mechanical, failure but that does not comport with the outcome of my "percussive maintenance". Confused.

Might be the NAS power management is not working properly. could have blown the drives 5V rail somewhere. Better send the whole unit back and get a new one.