NSA325 failing - can I move drives to a computer?

blickbox

I have a NSA325 v2 with 2 drives totalling 4,5TB. So I suppose RAID 0.

The NSA is failing - suddenly I lose contact with SMB, and the web interface is unresponsive or just serving a blank page. Rebooting solves it temporarily.

I think the drives are OK, I did a scan with no failures.

Does anyone know if it's possible to transfer these drives directly to another (linux) PC or NAS device without reformating?

Also, if I buy an external USB to backup the NAS to. Does it need to be a specific filesystem? Can I just connect a drive from factory to the USB port and it will format and do everything automatically?

Mijzelf

A general purpose Linux PC can use these drives as-is. They contain a normal Linux software raid in raid0 or linear, and a normal ext3 filesystem. A NAS device is trickier. I'm not aware of any NAS which doesn't want to use it's own disk layout. When you have shell access you can of course assemble and mount the data volume manually, as I don't think there is any 2 disk NAS which doesn't support Linux software raid and ext3.

There is one caveat, if you want to connect those disks by USB there could be a problem. Some SATA-USB convertors do a sector size translation on big (>2TB) disks. Then they expose 4kB sectors, while the disk has 512 byte sectors. (And many disks internally have 4kB sectors, making the circle round). As the partition table addresses in sectors, this is incompatible. On a modern Linux PC you can work around this by creating a loop device on top of the disk: 'losetup -f —sector-size=512 /dev/sdX'.

Also, if I buy an external USB to backup the NAS to. Does it need to be a specific filesystem? Can I just connect a drive from factory to the USB port and it will format and do everything automatically?

A disk which can contain 4TB, will be factory formatted to NTFS or exFAT. AFAIK the NAS doesn't support exFAT. It supports NTFS, but that is CPU bound. You would get the best result by putting an ext3 filesystem on the disk. I don't know if the webinterface has a function for that. At least the NAS won't do it automatically. Never destroy data whithout asking.