2 Drives Failed: Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 (Raid5)

[GeeksMirage]

I own a Blackarmor NAS 440.
I sent up 4 brand new 3TB Seagate drives in RAID 5.
It has been working fine for ~2 years, until this July.

HDD3 failed. I requested a replacement under warranty, and rebuilt the disk. Then HDD2 failed 2 weeks later. Received new disk under warranty, then rebuilt. After another 1 week, HDD1 failed, but came back up again a day later. Then HDD3 failed the next day. I sent for a replacement, but by that time HDD1 had failed again .

Now I have 2 failed drives.

I thought that it may be the RAID Controller. I got a new NAS Box from seagate, and transferred over the HDDs carefully in the same order, but it says that the system has foreign disks. According to Seagate:
"Inserting the old drives into the new NAS box will not give access to the data stored to the drives. To recover the data on the drives, professional data recovery is needed. I have provided the link for the data recovery services we offer below..."

So I have no clue what I can do. I have 2 questions:
1. Is there any way in which I can recover the data? If I connect is as a secondary? Boot into Linux and mount it etc ?

2. If I had to use another NAS in the future, which one should I get? Or should I simply rely on secondary drives, since Ive never had one of those fail (And I have used 10-15 drives over the last 8 years - Seagate, WD, Samsung, Hitachi etc.).

 

[GeeksMirage]

Anyone? Im trying to figure this out, so that I know if I need to buy a new NAS on Thanksgiving ..

 

[fzabkar]

You could try assembling the drives as a software RAID using a freeware Linux tool such as mdadm. Then use ddrescue to clone the array. Ddrescue understands how to work around bad sectors.

Otherwise, can you elaborate on the drive failures?

Do the drives still spin up?

Do they still report their correct model number and full capacity?

 

[GeeksMirage]

Do the drives spin up? Do the report their model number? - I dont know would be my answer.

Since they are in the NAS case, in the Seagate Admin software it doesnt show loaded. I can check on the spins since they are in their slot when connected and hence dont know about the model either.

I think ur mdadm solution is the one I plan to try.
Im buying a new comp. Once I have it here, I'll connect all 4 to that and take it from there.