Q: What happens if my NAS hard drive fails?

2024-09-10

Even if an ASUSTOR NAS hard drive fails, data is usually not lost immediately as long as you have properly configured the protection mechanism of RAID, a data storage technology that provides data redundancy in case of hard drive failure.

• Receive a system alarm: When a hard disk fails, an alarm is usually sent to alert you.
• Replace the hard disk: Replace the failed hard disk as soon as possible. most models of ASUSTOR NAS support hot-swapping, so you can replace the hard disk without shutting down the computer, and the system will start rebuilding the data automatically.
• Monitor rebuild progress: You can monitor the rebuild progress in ADM.

• RAID 0: Increased read and write speeds, but no data redundancy, any hard disk failure will cause all data to be lost.
• RAID 1: Data is fully copied to another hard disk. When one drive fails, the system automatically recovers data from the mirrored drive.
• RAID 5: Data and parity information is spread across multiple hard disks. It can tolerate the failure of one hard disk.
• RAID 6: Spreads data and two sets of parity information across multiple hard disks. Tolerates two hard disk failures.
• RAID 10: Combines RAID 0 and RAID 1 for performance and fault tolerance.

• Data Security: During the rebuild period, please avoid excessive operations on the NAS to avoid affecting the rebuild progress.
• Professional assistance: If you are not familiar with RAID rebuild, we recommend you to seek assistance from ASUSTOR customer service or professionals.