Read this before you do anything else
Don't power it on to see if it survived. That test is the risk.
The instinct after a drop is to plug it in and check. On a drive with spinning platters, that check is the most dangerous single action available: if the heads were displaced or the mechanics knocked out of alignment, powering on drives them across the surface holding your files. A drive that was survivable while switched off becomes a head-crash while you watch the progress bar. Whether it was running at the moment of impact matters enormously, and either way the answer comes from inspection, not from another attempt.
Emergency
Dropped NAS
If your NAS has been dropped, the most useful thing on this page is above this paragraph, and it is free. What follows is what the fault usually turns out to be, how recoverable this class of failure is, and what it would cost, including the cases we would tell you to take elsewhere.
What this usually turns out to be
A toppled or dropped NAS is unusual in one specific and unhelpful way: it applies the same shock to several hard drives at once, and it very often does so while all of them are spinning, because these units run continuously. That is the opposite of the redundancy the array was built for, which assumes disks fail independently and one at a time. A knock that would be survivable on a single drive can leave two members damaged simultaneously, and two lost members is where most array configurations stop being recoverable by rebuild.
An array is a set of member disks plus the arrangement that binds them. Losing the arrangement loses the data even when every disk is healthy.
Head assembly displaced or damaged
The likeliest serious outcome when a drive is dropped while running. Powering on afterwards is what turns it into surface damage.
Platter damage from head contact at impact
Where the heads struck the surface during the fall, leaving scoring already present before any power-up.
Nothing at allbetter news
Drives are designed to survive substantial shock while parked and idle. A drop onto carpet while switched off very often does no damage whatsoever.
Cracked solder joint or connector damagebetter news
Common on USB sticks and phones, where the impact is taken by the connector rather than any storage. The memory itself is usually intact.
What to check first on a NAS
- Do not power it back up straight away. Establish whether it was running when it fell.
- Label every disk with its bay position, then leave them in place.
- If it is already running, read the storage manager for the state of each member and record it without acting.
What not to do
Do not rebuild, and do not replace a disk the unit has flagged. After a simultaneous shock the surviving members are the least trustworthy they have ever been, and a rebuild reads all of them end to end. That is the operation most likely to convert a difficult recovery into an impossible one.
How recoverable this is
Governed almost entirely by one question: was it running when it fell? A parked, powered-off drive dropped a short distance frequently survives with nothing wrong at all. A drive dropped while spinning is the harder case, and it gets harder every time it is powered on afterwards. Flash devices and phones fare much better: with no moving parts, a drop usually damages the connector or the board rather than the storage.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- Whether the device was powered on and spinning at the moment of impact
- Whether the impact displaced the heads or damaged the platter surface
- How many times it has been powered on since
We will not give you a percentage for your device, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody can know what is recoverable until the media has been imaged and read. What is above describes this class of failure; your drive gets its own answer after an assessment, in writing, at no cost.
What it costs
Assessed free, then referred at no charge
Cleanroom mechanical work
Clicking, seized or head-crashed drives need internal mechanical work in a controlled environment. We don't have one, so we assess it, tell you what we found in writing, and refer it on. That referral costs you nothing here.
Nothing is charged until you have seen a fixed quote for your actual device and agreed to it, and the assessment that produces it is free.
Other faults on a NAS
Next step
Tell us what failed.
Free assessment. Fixed quote before recovery starts. No recovery, no fee. Sydney drop-off or Australia-wide by tracked post.