WD MyCloud PR4100 RAID Recovery

[UnknownPhilosopher]

Question for those more knowledgeable than myself:

 

I have a Western Digital PR4100 (32TB, 4x 8TB WD Red) MyCloud NAS that was running in RAID 0 when it got hung while doing a firmware update. When I eventually got it back up, my array was missing. After some checking, I ended up putting the drives in my Win10 machine (both directly and via a USB 4 drive enclosure) just to check their health, and it became clear that 1 of the 4 drives is having problems. 3 of the drives all show up with what appears to be all of the correct partition structures, but 1 of the drives appears unpartitioned. I tried a couple of simple RAID and partition recovery programs (I know you aren't really supposed to do so) to see if I might get lucky and the partition info could easily be restored, but I've not had any luck. Also, when that drive is plugged directly into a pc, the system just hangs while it tries to access the drive (which does have power) and I have to remove it to get the system to respond. I'm willing to accept that drive is toast.

 

My question is actually regarding recovery services. I'm not super familiar with RAID technical details beyond the basics, and I'm looking into professional data recovery. Given my details, could I expect that this one drive might be able to be professionally recovered to a new drive that I could throw in with the other 3, or does the fact it was in RAID 0 mean recovery services would need to deal with all 4 drives? It is all flat-files (video, audio files, documents, etc.), and the recovery importance factor for me might be significantly different depending on if recovery is 1 drive for a few hundred, or all 4 for a few thousand dollars.

 

This is my first post to the community I've been a huge fan of for 6+ years. Any information or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

[Pickles von Brine]

Yeah unforunately this is a situation where you are going to have to send it in for data recovery. Just a heads up, that recovery won't be cheap. 

There is a CHANCE they could do what you ask, but generally most data recovery companies won't do that. They need all 4 drives and the raid parameters need to be rebuilt to get the data. Something that is time consuming and can be a real pain in the butt. Your best bet here is to stop what you are doing, pack everything up and send it out for recovery. Get a quote at least. Make sure it is packed really well. If possible, send the entire unit. 

Do not be surprised if this recovery hits 2000-5000 to recover. Possibly more.  Most companies charge per TB over 4TB for recovery. 

Companies I recommend:
Salvage Data

We Recover Data

Drive Savers

No particular order. Salvage Data I use to work for and I can safely say they are one of the best. The guys there really are top notch (I am formerly a data recovery engineer myself). We Recover Data did Linus's recovery. Drive Savers is the defacto. They are the big wigs in the industry. Though I have mixed feelings on them for various reasons. 

 

[Robchil]

Advice for next time you set up 4 drives in raid, use raid5, you loose ca one disk in space but can handle one disk failing, depending on your controller you can add spare disk too, only use raid 0 to speed up disks you are not afraid of crashing.

 

you could try to recover yourself, but you need the capacity to restore the data somewhere not on your current broken raid. 

https://www.stellarinfo.com/gdc/raid-data-recovery-software.php

https://www.diskinternals.com/raid-recovery/raid-0-recovery/

are a few you can try. 

[UnknownPhilosopher]

This is a cautionary tale for others because I do typically use RAID 5 with a 4 drive setup. I was only going to run RAID 0 for long enough to move files from my Plex server and then back after a format of it, which is also a 32TB unit. I literally only needed to run this as RAID 0 for 2-3 days, and that is when everything went down.

 

Life lesson of the day: Murphy's law cannot be beaten.

 

I also do just happen to have 40TB or so extra that I can setup, I've just been hesitant to try any real manual recovery efforts because every professional service says don't as it can further alter the configuration. 

 

Does anyone know what the real danger possibilities might be of any non-destructive consumer recovery attempts in regards to if I do need to then go to a pro service?

[Pickles von Brine]

Well, since one of your drives is locking up, you won't be able to get it to work unless you can make an exact image of that drive. 

 

Then you have to get the raid parameters and rebuild the array. However, you must have all 4 drives. 

 

Some software isn't fully write protected and can possibly write to the drive so the pros are right. I have seen it happen first hand. Forget what software. 

[Domain Admin TEC]

I would use R-Studio from https://rstudio.com/.

This software will allow you to recreate a virtual RAID set by directly connecting to your healthy drives. With that you will have access to all of your data and probably can move the data to a new and fress disk set in a new enclosure.

Good luck!