NAS, or Hard Drive broken?

Do you have a spare drive that you could temporarily put into the Qnap (obviously one with no important data on it)?  That would tell you if the enclosure is working.

I'm not familiar with Qnap NAS, however if QFinder is a utility that interrogates the NAS drive and is returning this message then I would be less likely to think it is this at fault.

Could you take the HDD out of the NAS box and temporarily connect it to a PC?  That should also help narrow down the cause.

When a HDD went down in my qnap I remember a loud rythamic clicking. When the qnap failed it made no distinctive sound at all - looked like was going to boot up and never did. Not sure if my experience is representative of what signal you get to a problem. mins was a 2 drive nas configured as one big drive, and I remember taking a drive out and putting back in made the nas think it was a new drive, and you could no longer access the data on it. Perhaps different with a single drive, and perhaps time had moved on and this does not happen anymore.

good look - I gave up on mine I'm afraid, and replaced with something technically  inferior, but did the job.

Thanks Graham

I don't have a spare drive, and not sure how I'd connect the existing drive to to my iMac

Thanks CariocaJeff

Yes, the same loud "rythmic clicking" sound as mine. 

Did your HDD fail at the same time as your Qnap enclosure?

I was going to ask, if I remove the HDD from the enclosure, will I lose all the data? But then if it's the HDD that's failed, then I guess it doesn't really matter! 

Strange thing is, the HDD status light is green, indicating all is well??

I might be worth contacting a specialist computer cmpy & talk thru what's possible,  data can be recovered from damaged drives but I'm not sure of that success rate.

No a hdd failed after about 3 months use, and the enclosure after 2 years. I found the qnap used to be spinning most of the time and never found out why.

I am far from an expert but with mine it seemed to say that any drive newly connected would be treated as a new drive and any data on it lost, but as I say things may have moved on! as I think my nas was possibly an early 2 bay version, bought in 2010. 

in some ways your  symptoms sound more like my enclosure problem - mine used to look like things were fine, but never booted up, although I cannot remember any audible indication of a fault At that time.

Apologies if not much help. As suggested perhaps someone in the computer business could help.

Firstly, the fact that QFinder can connect to your NAS drive and that the HDD indicator light is a solid green seem to be positive signs. Solid green HDD indicator usually means that the HDD can be accessed.

As a first step I would open QFinder and log into the NAS and check the dashboard (on the RHS) to see what that indicates as System Health, HDD Health and Storage. 

Depending on these indicators you may need to open Control Panel/Storage Manager for more details or to do a check/test on your HDD.

Good luck

The flashing green status light can mean:

You mention that you attempted to set up the NAS from scratch. Did this entail (re)formatting your HDD and, if so, did the NAS complete this?

Thank you sjbabbey

If I enter http://192.168.0.2 into the browser, I get a Qnap page with a 'flashing red message', "Hard Drive Missing". It will not let me progress beyond this page, and go into the control panel to check system health etc...Also, I wasn't given the option of re formatting the HDD.

I have just removed the HDD, did a system reset, then reinstalled the HDD. Same message, "Hard Drive Missing"!

Status lights are the same:

HDD solid green.

System status flashing green.

Exactly the same thing has happened to my QNAP TS119. I've put it down to HD failure and have ordered a new one so will see what happens on receipt.

I am hoping that if anything happens to my Unitiserve in the interim then the data will be retrievable from the broken HD!

Think once mine got me into the dashboard. It said the HDDs were both ok. Tried to copy key files off while the going seemed good but could not do anything, and never got in again.

Apart from the failures I had the biggest problem was after if started automatically updating the firmware. after one update my nas  was so slow it struggled on serving music, and could not stream the native DVDs i had ripped when I went to Brazil. After a couple of days and several exchanges with the  help line, I realised it was doing something  to each individual file, which given there were nearly 300 DVDs, was an awful lot of files. Took 6 days to complete and get back to normal. with you both having a similar problem at a similar time, I hope such an update had not caused an issue!

This looks like a similar problem to the one discussed on the QNAP forum here:

http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?t=100848

Unfortunately it doesn't look like they resolved this issue.

I had the unfortunate experience of "losing" my data on an early QNAP (TS 101). This was caused by the NAS shutting down in a power  cut whilst it was recompiling the libraries in Twonky.

What I did find is that I was able to remove the hard drive and then mount it in an external enclosure. The drive was not visible in Windows, but all the data could be seen and successfully retrieved on a PC loaded with Ubuntu (Linux). Might be worth a try before spending a fortune on the services of a data recovery specialist. I am sure you could pick up a PC capable of running Linux for peanuts.

Once I recovered my data, I was able to remount the drive in the QNAPO an re-initialise it. So all the data were wiped and I was left with the tedious job of copying the data over again to the QNAP.

Good luck !

This is likley an HDD failure, perhaps a good reason to consider a TS-212P in RAID1 mode (for not a lot more money for the enslosure plus the cost of a second HD)

The extra  cost is surely worth the redundancy IMO

For those of you that can accommodate it, ie, have the nas away from the hifi, I would suggest the purchase of something a bit more robust, single bay nas drives really are the lowest of the pile in terms of capability, redundancy and usefulness. If you have spent circa 2k on piece of hifi surely you can spend just ten percent more on a decent, proper server?

You can still pick up hp prolient N54Ls for silly money, upgradable, capable and fast. Or a second hand dell precision t3400 for peanuts, these can squeeze 6 harddrives in on the on board sata and power.

If you must go 'out of the box' the for god sake don't pick the cheapest thing you can find it will only end in tears

I think that's quite right and reasonable if you want the NAS as a Server but mine is wholly as a back up for my Unitiserve and absolutely nothing else. Even having said that I might look for something more suitable going forward but not with 6 hard drives!

Anyway I appear to have got it working again by restarting it without the HDD inserted as per the QNAP forum suggestion and it's merrily backing up now so fingers crossed it continues although the pessimist in me doubts it.

quote:

I have a single bay Qnap NAS, TS 112. Yesterday, I noticed a loud, continuous clicking sound coming from the drive

I am not familiar with Qnap but I have been working with disk drives for 40 years. The clicking noise from the drive is the internal heads trying to find track 0 - not finding it then trying again and again etc. I would suggest powering down the nas and leave it off and take out the drive for a couple of hours (too cool it off) and reseating the drive back in the nas. I've only seen this work a couple of times. But if it does come back up make a backup of it right away. In most cases if the drive comes back to life it will usually fail again. In the computer business we call this the click of death. Not good

That is unbelievable, I'm getting exactly the same problems as the guys on the Qnap forum! And no, there was no happy ending.

I need to find a way (A cheap way) to determine, if it's the HDD or the Qnap enclosure that's faulty.

It was only last year, that I told myself, "If this breaks, I'm gonna get a Synology"! But I'm sure there are people that have had horror stories with those too! 

A USB enclosure may be the cheapest way. However, even if I got an enclosure for the Qnap's HDD, it probably won't run if I plugged it into my iMac?

Yes, the dreaded "click of death", I've read about that. I don't really want to bin the whole lot, if it's just the HDD, or just the enclosure that is faulty. Have read the above Qnap forum link, it could well be a software issue, as several people have experienced the same issue.

I do have two backups.

The enclosure will not cause the click of death. That is the drive. That said if the drive comes back to life it may not stay that way very long but you should be able to see it and copy to some other back up immediately. In most but not all cases the drive in the enclosure will encrypt or format the data so I can't steal it your and put it my system. That's why you want to back it up right away

Best of luck

That's a valid point gary, I have to hold my hands up and admit, the TS-112 was one of the cheapest going. However, most members that have a NAS, normally own a Qnap, or Synology. Quite a few of the 'regular members' of this forum opt for Synology.

I don't really want loads of bays and HDDs sitting there idle. Out of the 1TB that I have, (or did have) I have only used one third of the 1TB space. This contains all my ripped CDs and numerous Hi Res Downloads.

Thanks for that info Octa_dyn.

Camlan...Please tell me more, what did you do?

Thank you Mike, I do have two backups to resort to, but I obviously want to establish what's failed. The HDD, or the enclosure it's self.

Camlan, I have just tried what the forum suggested, but keep getting the same message in red,"Hard Drive Missing". It does not allow me to progress into the control centre, or any other part of the NAS.