NAS devices are often situated out of sight and don’t have regular maintenance performed on them. Therefore, this can result in nobody noticing the early warning signs displayed via the unit that a disk is overheating/failing, etc.

Network-attached storage (NAS) drives often fail due to poor ventilation, causing them to overheat, subsequently resulting in cooked hard drives. The damage from overheating drives ranges from malfunctioning PCB’s, damaged magnetic read/write heads, to surface damage on the platters and many other problems.

NAS devices are typically multiple disk RAID models; however, some manufacturers do produce single disk models, for example, ‘Western Digital My Cloud’ has a range that only incorporates a single hard drive.

It is not uncommon for NAS devices to utilize a unique Linux operating system, typically employing the Extended File System (Ext2/Ext3/Ext4), XFS (Netgear), or ReiserFS file systems. The data is generally wrapped up inside ‘inode data structures’ that are far more complicated than conventional file systems such as NTFS.These systems can easily become corrupted, often creating challenging recovery cases. Excellent working knowledge of these file systems is essential for high chances of successful recoveries.