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Way back in the day (like 4 years ago), I decided a NAS would be a good addition to my gadget collection to handle my issue of too many photos, and not enough space to keep them all.

I got a SANS Digital TR4UT-B 4 Bay enclosures and 2 3TB Seagates set up in a RAID 1 since I was more concerned about data integrity than speed.

Then about 6 months later we moved, and our new place didn't have enough room for me to set it up again. So the unit sat on a shelf for about 3 years until I dusted it off last week. I tried firing it up, but the indicator lights are showing that both the drives have failed. First question, how likely is that? considering that they were only in use for only about 6 months? Second question, is there anything I can do to try and recover the drives/data? I'm not positive what's on the drives, but I'd like to find a way to take a look and make sure nothing critical is lost. Final question, how can I tell if the issue is a software/data corruption problem or a physical problem with the drives (i.e. if I wipe the drives, will they be good to use as reasonably fresh drives)?

Thanks!

Pull drives and connect to Sata on computer-That should give indication if faulty...............

I'm worried that might overwrite metadata or something though, and wreck the array. Anyone know if this is true or not?

Like HERETIC says, hook them up to another system and see if they spin up. If they spin up, use a tool that lets you pull the SMART diagnostic info (or a Linux live thumbdrive). As long as you don't try to format (or let Windows "label" the drives) nothing should get written.

Since the NAS was just sitting unused, I doubt the issue is corruption of the drive contents. A few guesses as to what may have happened...

- NAS got dropped/banged hard enough during the move to kill the drives. Desktop HDDs are quite sensitive to mechanical shock.

- NAS was stored somewhere damp, and corrosion killed the drives.

- Corroded or loose drive connectors.

- Disk controller has failed.

- PSU in NAS is starting to fail, can't spin drives up.

If the drives won't spin up in another system, recovery is going to involve a third-party data recovery service (expensive).

If the problem is with the NAS, you might need to repair the NAS (or get another similar one) to get your data back, depending on how they implemented the RAID. (This is why I dislike proprietary RAID solutions -- if the hardware fails, you can have trouble getting your data back unless you have a spare of the RAID hardware.)

Whether or not the drives are still usable will obviously depend on the nature of the failure. If the problem is with the NAS, then yeah wiping and re-using the drives for something else should be fine.

Ok, so I pulled one of the drives out and plugged it into a Windows box. The drive was detected and drivers installed. The disk management utility wanted to initialize something, but I told it no.. Looking at the info, it shows a 128GB uninitialized partition.

The NAS was stored indoors in a closet, and I live in CA so, it's pretty dry.. When I powered on the NAS, it spun up the drives (I could hear them) and the lights on the front were green for about 30 sec, then they flipped to red (both drives), but not at the same time. Drive one flipped first and then drive 2 changed about 10 sec later.

I'm guessing this is pointing to an issues with the RAID controller, and it can't build/read the array?

Maybe try burning an image of hirens, and while the drive is hooked up to your pc boot to the cd and run seagate seatools from there. Seatools has a drive diagnostic utility that checks for problems. Should pick up general failures or bad sectors...