Drives and Storage
Mixing Drive Sizes and Brands in a NAS
You can mix capacities and brands more than the forums claim, but SMR drives and one sizing rule can quietly…
Drives
Drives and Storage
Drives are the heart of any NAS, and they are also the part most likely to fail. This section is about disks, volumes, and the arrays that hold your data together. You will find help reading SMART warnings, spotting a dying drive before it takes your pool with it, and replacing a failed disk without losing everything. We explain RAID levels in language that makes sense, cover degraded and rebuilding volumes, and walk through bad sectors, unrecognized disks, and capacity that mysteriously vanishes. Whether you run mirrored drives at home or a larger array, the goal is the same: keep your storage healthy, understand the warning signs early, and know exactly what to do when a drive gives out.
20 guides in this section
Drives and Storage
Drive Clicking or Beeping in Your NAS: Causes
Learn which NAS drive noises are harmless, which mean a dying disk, and exactly which sound tells you to back…
Drives and Storage
How to Test a Suspected Bad NAS Drive
Run the right tests before you spend money on a replacement, and find out whether that drive is truly dying…
Drives and Storage
TrueNAS Degraded ZFS Pool: Case Study Recovery
A play-by-play of recovering a degraded four-drive ZFS pool in TrueNAS after a WD Red faulted, from first alert to…
Drives and Storage
QNAP Drive Marked as Error: How to Recover
A QTS disk flagged with error status is not always a dead drive. Here is how to read the signs…
Drives and Storage
How Much Drive Failure Costs a Home NAS Owner
A failed NAS drive can cost you 90 dollars or 1,500 dollars depending on one thing: whether you had a…
Drives and Storage
Pre-Replacement Checklist for a Dying NAS Drive
Run these checks before you pull a failing disk so the rebuild finishes clean instead of taking the whole array…
Drives and Storage
SMART Attributes That Predict Drive Failure
Not every SMART value means anything. Here are the handful that actually warn you before a drive dies, and the…
Drives and Storage
Common Myths About RAID and Backups
The beliefs that quietly leave home NAS owners exposed, and the simple corrections that actually keep your files safe.
Drives and Storage
7 Mistakes When Replacing a NAS Hard Drive
Swapping a NAS disk sounds simple until one wrong bay or mismatched drive wipes your array. Here is what actually…