Southampton Data Recovery are the No.1 RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 recovery specialists in the UK. If you’re facing a failed array right now—whether it’s a NAS or rack-mount server—our RAID engineers offer free diagnostics and the best value, backed by 25+ years of hands-on experience across home users, SMEs, multinationals and government departments. We handle everything from data recovery RAID 5, QNAP RAID 5 data recovery, RAID 6 data recovery and RAID 10 data recovery to complex virtualised storage pools, encrypted volumes and cloud-backed sync targets.

What we recover from (brands & platforms)

Top 20 NAS / external RAID brands used in the UK (with popular models)

(Representative “most-popular” examples we see most often in UK jobs—desktop and rack NAS plus external RAID enclosures.)

1. Synology – DS923+, DS224+, DS1522+, RS1221+
2. QNAP – TS-464, TS-453D, TVS-h874, TS-873A
3. Western Digital (WD) My Cloud / WD NAS – EX2 Ultra, PR4100, My Cloud Home Duo
4. Netgear ReadyNAS – RN424, RR3312, RN628X
5. Buffalo TeraStation/LinkStation – TS3420DN, TS5400DN, LS220D
6. Asustor – AS5304T (Nimbustor 4), AS6604T (Lockerstor 4)
7. TerraMaster – F4-423, F5-422, D5-300C (external RAID)
8. LaCie (Seagate) – 2big RAID, 5big, 6big
9. Promise Technology – Pegasus R4/R6/R8 series (Thunderbolt), VTrak series
10. Drobo – 5N/5N2, 5D/5D3, 8D (BeyondRAID; legacy but still widely in use)
11. Thecus – N4810, N5810PRO, rackmount N7710
12. iXsystems / TrueNAS (FreeNAS) – TrueNAS Mini X, X-Series, M-Series
13. Lenovo/Iomega – ix4-300d, px4-300d (legacy)
14. Zyxel – NAS326, NAS542
15. D-Link – DNS-340L, DNS-327L
16. OWC – ThunderBay RAID series
17. Areca – ARC-8050T3U (Thunderbolt RAID enclosure)
18. HighPoint – RocketRAID external arrays
19. Qsan / Infortrend – SME rack arrays (common in UK labs/SMEs)
20. Seagate – Enterprise rack enclosures & legacy BlackArmor NAS seen in field

Top 15 RAID server / storage platforms (with popular models)

1. Dell PowerEdge / PowerVault – R740xd/R750, PowerVault ME4012/ME4024
2. HPE ProLiant / MSA / Nimble – DL380 Gen10/Gen11, MSA 2060, Nimble HF series
3. Lenovo ThinkSystem / DE-Series – SR650/SR630, DE4000/DE6000
4. Supermicro SuperServer – 2U/4U storage chassis (e.g., 6029/6049 series)
5. Cisco UCS C-Series – C240 M5/M6 with RAID/caching modules
6. NetApp FAS/ AFF – FAS2700, AFF A-Series (often LUN exports to VMware)
7. Synology RackStation – RS3621xs+, RS4021xs+
8. QNAP Enterprise – ES2486dc, TS-h2490FU (QuTS hero/ZFS)
9. iXsystems TrueNAS X/M – X20/X30, M40/M50 (ZFS)
10. Promise VTrak – E-Class, D5000 series
11. HGST/Western Digital Ultrastar – JBOD + RAID controllers in OEM builds
12. Fujitsu PRIMERGY – RX2540 storage builds
13. Huawei OceanStor – 2200/2600 SMB deployments
14. ASUS RS-Series – RS720/RS520 storage servers
15. Netgear ReadyNAS Rackmount – RR3312/RR4312 (SMB)

Top 75 RAID/NAS faults we recover from (with how we fix them)

Below is a concise summary of each fault plus a technical recovery note describing what we actually do in-lab (software, electronic and/or mechanical procedures). This mix of techniques is what underpins our success in data recovery RAID 5, QNAP RAID 5 data recovery, RAID 6 data recovery and RAID 10 data recovery cases.

1. Multiple drive failures (close together) – Summary: Array drops to degraded then fails during rebuild. Fix: Stabilise member disks; clone each to lab-grade targets; rebuild RAID virtually from verified images; map bad sectors; file-system repair.
2. UREs during rebuild – Summary: Unrecoverable Read Errors abort rebuild. Fix: Adaptive imaging with deep ECC; head-map tuning; parity maths to re-synthesise unreadable stripes; constrained rebuild.
3. RAID controller failure – Summary: Dead/buggy controller corrupts metadata. Fix: Extract raw disk images; reverse-engineer RAID geometry from superblocks; emulate controller in software; rebuild.
4. Foreign/stale metadata – Summary: Controller sees “foreign config”. Fix: Forensic read-only import; dump metadata; reconstruct correct sequence/order; rebuild in software emulator.
5. Disk order wrong/removal/re-insertion – Summary: Wrong slot order ruins parity. Fix: Stripe-signature analysis; XOR parity validation; derive correct sequence; virtualise array.
6. Firmware bugs (controller or disk) – Summary: BSY lockups, bad microcode. Fix: Safe-mode flashing, ROM swaps, vendor utilities; then clone and rebuild.
7. Bad sectors / media decay – Summary: SMART reallocation spikes. Fix: Head-selective imaging; read-retry modulation; defect skipping; parity repair of gaps.
8. Accidental reinitialisation – Summary: Quick init wipes metadata. Fix: Carve previous RAID headers; infer stripe size/offset; virtual undelete of config; recover FS.
9. Parity drive failure – Summary: Parity disk unreadable/failed. Fix: Use surviving data disks; recompute parity; repair stripes with targeted math.
10. Rebuild aborted/looping – Summary: Rebuild restarts, never finishes. Fix: Disk-by-disk health triage; stabilise weakest drives; image; then software-side rebuild.
11. Hot spare takeover faults – Summary: Spare introduced with wrong block size/offset. Fix: Identify OCE/expansion point; compensate offset/4Kn vs 512e; re-stripe virtually.
12. Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) failed – Summary: Growth operation corrupts layout. Fix: Reconstruct pre- and post-OCE layouts; mount both virtually; merge extents.
13. Level migration failed (e.g., 5→6) – Summary: Mid-migration crash. Fix: Decode migration journal; reproduce algorithm in software; finish migration virtually.
14. Mixed sector size (4Kn/512e) – Summary: Controller writes misaligned stripes. Fix: Normalise sectors in images; adjust offsets; rebuild with canonical size.
15. Backplane/SAS expander faults – Summary: Link resets, CRC storms. Fix: Bypass expander; direct-attach HBA; image each drive; rebuild off-box.
16. Power loss mid-write (“write-hole”) – Summary: Incoherent stripes. Fix: Parity reconciliation; journal replay; targeted XOR to fix dirty regions.
17. BBU/Cache module failure – Summary: Cache goes write-through or corrupts data. Fix: Disable cache; reconstruct from stable images; repair FS journal/log.
18. NVMe cache/SSD tier failure – Summary: Tiering loses hot blocks. Fix: Recover SSD cache first; merge with HDD tier by metadata replay; rebuild pool.
19. Thin-provisioned LUN full – Summary: LUN goes read-only/corrupt. Fix: Clone LUN backing store; extend virtually; replay FS/VMFS logs; recover VMs.
20. VMFS/VMDK corruption – Summary: ESXi datastore unreadable. Fix: Rebuild RAID; carve VMFS; parse VMDK descriptors/extents; restore VMs.
21. Hyper-V VHDX set corruption – Summary: AVHDX chain broken. Fix: Reorder checkpoints; merge differencing disks; repair headers/footers.
22. Windows Dynamic Disk failure – Summary: LDM metadata lost. Fix: Rebuild LDM from mirrors; reconcile extents; mount NTFS.
23. Linux mdadm superblock loss – Summary: md arrays won’t assemble. Fix: Scan for alternate superblocks; compute layout; assemble read-only in lab.
24. LVM metadata corruption – Summary: VG/LV won’t activate. Fix: Recover PV headers; restore archived metadata; map LVs manually.
25. Btrfs RAID issues – Summary: Btrfs scrub/repair loops. Fix: Use btrfs-rescue tooling; rebuild RAID under read-only; copy-out files with checksums.
26. ZFS pool degraded/unimportable – Summary: vdevs missing/failed. Fix: Clone members; import with altroot/readonly; zpool status mapping; zdb reconstruction.
27. EXT4 journal corruption – Summary: Unclean journal prevents mount. Fix: Journal replay on cloned image; inode/table fixes; copy-out.
28. XFS log corruption – Summary: Metadata log dirty. Fix: xlog replay against clone; phase-based repair; salvage.
29. NTFS MFT damage – Summary: Files/folders vanish. Fix: Mirror MFT rebuild; fixup arrays; record patching and DIR tree rebuild.
30. APFS container loss – Summary: APFS won’t mount on NAS export. Fix: Rebuild GPT; locate APFS containers; parse snapshots; extract data.
31. HFS+ catalog B-tree damage – Summary: macOS shares unreadable. Fix: B-tree rebuild and extents overflow repair from clone.
32. BitLocker/other encryption on LUN – Summary: Encrypted volume locked. Fix: Use provided keys/TPM captures; recover underlying RAID, then decrypt.
33. QNAP mdadm+LVM pool corruption – Summary: Storage Pool “Degraded/Unknown”. Fix: Dump md sets; reassemble PVs; restore LVM; mount EXT4/ZFS read-only.
34. QNAP DOM/OS corruption – Summary: NAS won’t boot. Fix: Image drives outside NAS; reconstruct array in lab; ignore DOM for data path.
35. Synology SHR metadata loss – Summary: SHR won’t assemble. Fix: Parse md layers; derive SHR map (heterogeneous sizes); virtual mount.
36. Drobo BeyondRAID pack fail – Summary: “Too many drives missing.” Fix: Read disk pack; interpret BeyondRAID translation tables; emulate layout in software.
37. Drobo mSATA cache failure – Summary: Pack inconsistent after cache death. Fix: Recover cache mapping; replay to HDD tier; rebuild pack.
38. Controller driver update regression – Summary: OS update breaks array. Fix: Offline clone; roll back driver in lab VM; export data.
39. Firmware head-map change (HDD) – Summary: Certain heads unreadable. Fix: Head-select imaging; intra-drive head swaps where required; firmware patching.
40. Translator corruption (HDD) – Summary: Slow/0 LBA. Fix: Vendor-specific terminal fixes; regenerate translator; clone.
41. PCB/ROM failure (HDD) – Summary: Drive dead. Fix: Donor PCB with ROM transfer (BGA/SPI); power-up, clone.
42. Head crash / media damage – Summary: Clicks, no ID. Fix: Clean-room head swap; align, calibrate; image with skip-on-error strategy.
43. Motor seizure/stiction – Summary: Spindle stuck. Fix: Donor HDA/motor transplant; platter transfer; image.
44. Servo/SA module corruption – Summary: Can’t calibrate. Fix: Module rebuild from donor; adaptive ROM tuning; clone.
45. SMART firmware bugs – Summary: False fails/hangs. Fix: Disable SMART offline ops; vendor resets; controlled imaging.
46. SATA/SAS link CRC storms – Summary: Timeouts, retries. Fix: Replace cables/ports; direct HBA; image and verify.
47. Backplane power/ripple fault – Summary: Brown-outs corrupt writes. Fix: Remove enclosure; line-conditioned imaging; parity reconciliation.
48. Overheating/thermal throttling – Summary: Drives drop from array. Fix: Thermal stabilisation; staged cloning; rebuild.
49. SMR “write cliff” behaviour – Summary: Sustained writes stall/fail. Fix: Long-tail imaging; CMR donors for rebuild capacity; re-stripe.
50. Helium leak / environmental shock – Summary: Acoustic anomalies. Fix: Mechanical triage; donor match; head/motor work; image.
51. Cable/connector damage – Summary: Intermittent presence. Fix: Re-terminate/replace; HBA direct attach; image.
52. Bent pins/port damage – Summary: Drive not detected. Fix: Hardware micro-rework; pad repair; then image.
53. JBOD misconfigured as RAID – Summary: Wrong mode destroys metadata. Fix: Carve pre-change layout; timeline merge; recover FS.
54. Snapshot store corruption – Summary: Snapshot chain broken. Fix: Mount base; salvage from intact snapshots; reconstruct deltas.
55. Dedup store damage – Summary: Missing refs. Fix: Rebuild dedup tables; export unique blocks to new store.
56. Thin pool metadata loss (LVM) – Summary: dp-metadata corrupt. Fix: Restore metadata from spare area; manual LV mapping.
57. Quota/index DB corruption (NAS) – Summary: Shares vanish. Fix: Reindex databases off-box; rebuild share maps; extract files.
58. ACL/xattr corruption – Summary: Permission errors block access. Fix: Salvage data layer sans ACLs; export with default perms.
59. Time skew / NTP rollback issues – Summary: Cluster coherence errors. Fix: Isolate nodes; mount read-only; export consistent snapshot.
60. Controller battery learn cycle lock – Summary: Array slow/failing. Fix: Bypass controller; software-side rebuild from clones.
61. Patrol read / media scan triggers fail – Summary: Patrol knocks weak disks out. Fix: Freeze config; image weak disks first; rebuild.
62. SSD wear-out (endurance) – Summary: Read-only/failed SSDs in RAID. Fix: Chip-off or firmware-assisted read; reconstruct stripes; replace tier.
63. NVMe namespace/firmware quirk – Summary: Namespace missing. Fix: Vendor toolbox to unlock; RAW image; rebuild array.
64. Sector-remap storms (pending spikes) – Summary: IO stalls → failure. Fix: Adaptive imaging with head/zone maps; parity math fill-in.
65. >2TB addressing/GPT problems – Summary: Truncation on legacy modes. Fix: Rebuild proper GPT; re-map offsets; recover data.
66. HPA/DCO hidden area – Summary: Capacity mismatch across disks. Fix: Remove HPA/DCO safely on images; unify size for layout.
67. Foreign LUN masking errors – Summary: Wrong LUN mapping. Fix: Map raw LUNs; reassemble file system; export.
68. iSCSI target DB corruption – Summary: Targets disappear. Fix: Rebuild target config; attach LUNs read-only; data out.
69. Share index / SMBd/NFSd failures – Summary: Services up, data missing. Fix: Mount volumes directly; bypass services; recover.
70. ReFS/CSVFS issues (Windows clusters) – Summary: CSV paused. Fix: Offline export from cloned LUNs; chkdsk equivalent where safe.
71. mdadm reshape interrupted – Summary: Resize died mid-op. Fix: Locate reshape markers; finish in emulator; mount.
72. Stripe size mismatch across members – Summary: Replaced disk with wrong geometry. Fix: Normalise virtual stripe; offset correction.
73. Controller NVRAM corruption – Summary: Config gone. Fix: Dump NVRAM; recover from on-disk metadata; rebuild virtually.
74. Reallocated parity inconsistency – Summary: Silent parity drift. Fix: Parity scrub on clones; targeted XOR to correct.
75. Filesystem superblock/alt-superblocks lost – Summary: No mount. Fix: Find/repair alt-superblocks; reconstruct inode tables; export.

Top 20 issues unique to virtual/pooled systems (QNAP, Drobo & similar)

1. QNAP Storage Pool “Unknown/Degraded” after update – We reassemble md sets, repair LVM PV/VG metadata, then mount EXT4/ZFS read-only to copy data.
2. QNAP QuTS hero (ZFS) won’t import – Clone members; zpool import with readonly & altroot; recover snapshots/datasets.
3. QNAP thin LUN metadata corruption – Restore LVM thin-pool metadata; map LUNs; repair VMFS/NTFS inside.
4. QNAP SSD cache Qtier failure – Extract cache content, replay to HDD tier via metadata journals; rebuild pool.
5. QNAP DOM/firmware loss (no boot) – Ignore DOM path; image disks directly; reconstruct arrays in lab.
6. QNAP expansion enclosure (TR/UX) mis-ordering – Derive correct disk order from stripe signatures; virtualise.
7. QNAP snapshot reserve exhaustion – Mount base volume; cull corrupt snapshot refs; copy data out.
8. QNAP iSCSI Target DB loss – Rebuild targets from config fragments; attach LUNs read-only for export.
9. QNAP bad sector during reshape – Adaptive clone; finish reshape in emulator; mount.
10. Drobo BeyondRAID dual-disk redundancy misreport – Emulate BeyondRAID translation; reconstruct pack; export.
11. Drobo pack migration failure – Parse disk pack metadata; fix sequence; emulate target chassis in software.
12. Drobo mSATA cache device failure – Recover/disable cache; reconcile to HDD tier; rebuild pack logic.
13. Drobo battery/UPS failure mid-write – Write-hole closure using block-map diff; parity repair.
14. Drobo “Too many drives missing” after one disk swap – Correct disk ID mapping; reconstruct parity/data slices.
15. Synology SHR mixed-size expansion broken – Recreate SHR map; mount virtually; copy-out.
16. TrueNAS pool feature-flag mismatch – Import with compatibility flags; send/receive to new pool.
17. Btrfs multi-device RAID5/6 instability – btrfs-rescue & chunk map rebuild; copy data to safer FS.
18. VM snapshot chain corruption (VMware/Hyper-V on NAS) – Reorder/merge deltas; fix headers; bring VM online.
19. Cloud-sync loop deletes (NAS ↔ OneDrive/Google) – Freeze sync; restore previous generation; export offline copy.
20. Encryption key store loss (NAS native encryption) – Recover pool first; apply customer keys; decrypt and extract.

Our in-lab recovery workflow (what we actually do)

1) Forensic intake & imaging

• Read-only handling; document controller settings; dump array metadata.
• Stabilise weak drives; clone every member to certified lab targets (HDD/NVMe) using adaptive head-map imaging and ECC-aware retry strategies.
• For electronic/mechanical faults: vendor firmware access, ROM swaps, head/motor swaps, translator rebuilds, donor matching, acoustic calibration.

2) Virtual array reconstruction

• Reverse-engineer RAID geometry (level, block size, parity rotation, offsets, order).
• Emulate the original controller in software; rebuild stripes from verified images only (never writing to originals).
• Handle growth/migrations (OCE, 5→6), sector-size normalisation (4Kn/512e), and cache/tier re-integration.

3) Filesystem/LUN repair & data extraction

• Mount filesystems read-only (NTFS, EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, ZFS, APFS, HFS+, VMFS, ReFS).
• Repair journals and metadata against cloned images; reconstruct snapshots, thin-provisioned LUNs and VM containers.
• Export to clean, checksum-verified media with full tree structure and permissions where recoverable.

4) Validation & secure return

• Hash-based verification (per-file/per-image).
• Optional recovery reports: what failed, what we fixed, what was unrecoverable and why.
• Advice to harden the platform (scrub cadence, firmware policy, spares, UPS/BBU testing, SMART/TLER configuration).

Why Southampton Data Recovery?

• 25+ years of RAID/NAS expertise (enterprise to home).
• Advanced tools & parts inventory: donor heads/PCBs, SAS/SATA/NVMe HBAs, disk-expander bypass kits, ROM programmers, enclosure spares.
• Full-stack capability: mechanical (HDA/head/motor), electronic (PCB/ROM/NVRAM), and software (controller emulation, FS repair).
• Safe methodology: always clone first, rebuild virtually, and extract read-only.
• UK-wide courier & walk-in options with free diagnostics.

SEO-friendly service summary

Southampton Data Recovery specialise in data recovery RAID 5, QNAP RAID 5 data recovery, RAID 6 data recovery and RAID 10 data recovery across Synology, QNAP, Netgear, Buffalo, Drobo, LaCie, WD and more. We recover after multiple drive failures, rebuild failures, controller faults, logical corruption, disk re-ordering, firmware bugs, bad sectors and accidental re-initialisation—on software and hardware RAID, desktop NAS, large NAS and rack arrays up to 32 disks.

What to do next

1. Power down the NAS/RAID (don’t retry rebuilds).
2. Label and remove disks in order (if safe to do so) and package in a padded box or envelope.
3. Contact our RAID engineers for free diagnostics – we’ll arrange UK-wide courier or local drop-in and start the lab process the same day.

Southampton Data Recovery – contact our RAID engineers today for a free diagnostics.
(We’ll guide you step-by-step and get your data back with the highest possible success rate.)