I feel I need to talk a bit about my harrowing tale here as warning for others.

I had a couple of 3Tb Seagate drives failing in my Synology NAS during a 1 month trip in June. I still could not diagnose what exactly happened, how it happened, if it was a simultaneous failure or one that spread over the course of the month I was away.

But after searching a while, I found many others complaining of similar failures. I still can’t toss this against Synology, but my case is just too similar.

I practically spent the entire month of July learning HDD recovery, and in the end had to pay a cool 100 bucks for software that could do it for me - recover data from degraded RAID 1 Synology drives.

No success with regular recovery software... recuva, ddrescue, testdisk, gparted and whatnot. Couldn’t find any open source recovery software that worked for my particular case too... if anyone has a recommendation, I’m all ears. It has to work with RAID configurations, and file systems used by NASs. If someone is looking for something like this, Runtime’s NAS Data Recovery worked for me, but like I said, you’ll have to pay cool 100 bucks. xD

Problem is, I still have 2x3Tb drives that, despite not having any apparent physical damage, are still reading as S.M.A.R.T. “abnormal”, which I’m guessing is something the Synology NAS marked by itself. And of course, I had to spend a whole lot more for HDD replacement. Prices are extremely high in Brazil right now.

Will probably have to do some low level format or something that completely resets the drive, if that’s even possible. And I’m not sure I’ll be able to use it on the NAS again.

It’s my fault for not having a separate backup really (the data recovery part), which is the recommendation I’m gonna make here - don’t rely on a single piece of hardware alone, backup to something else.