My Nas made a JBOD on 2 drives

Question

Thank you for reading this message and helping me.

Context: I recently had a NAS (DNS320L) that was faulty and I sent it back.

It was a 2 bay NAS and I has a WD Green 1TB drive and a WD Red 4TB drive. I therefore set up a 1TB Raid 1 and a 3TB JBOD on the remaining space on WD Red.

I returned the DNS320L however I want to recover my files. Since nothing actually went wrong with the hard drives or RAID I bought a Hard drive dock to usb and connected the WD Red drive and copied all the files on the RAID 1 to my computer. However, that is all that shows up, the JBOD files do not show up.

Problem I installed "DiskInternals Linux Reader" and was able to see what was going on:(as seen in images)

It seems as if the 1TB Green drive thinks it has the JBOD on it, and when I open a folder view of "HDb2" I see the folders of what I put in the JBOD. However, I am guessing that the actual data is on the 4TB red drive.

So now I am wondering if I need to have both drives connected simultaneously (by buying another hard drive dock to usb) in order to copy the JBOD files to my computer, or will this not work ?

Answer 1

If you combined the RAID volume with a JBOD... you're screwed. RAID 1 is redundant sure... but when you add a JBOD on top of it... you basically make your redundancy un-redundant. Whatever was stored on the RAID 1 volume is probably in-tact... but all sectors on the remaining 3tb are gone. (Notice, I said Sectors... not files). From a logical-standpoint... imagine a 4tb disk... and 3tb just go-away. What would you expect to happen? Just because the 1st TB is redundant... it does nothing for the remaining 3tb of that logical-disk. It is very unlikely you will recover much. You could try some file-carving utilities... but it is doubtful that you'll have much luck.

Never mix RAID modes (and/or JBOD) in the same volume... unless you really REALLY know what you're doing.