Read this before you do anything else
Do not power it on, and take it off charge. Corrosion is the clock.
Current through wet circuitry drives corrosion and shorts components that would otherwise have survived. The damage continues for as long as the device is powered and for as long as it stays wet, which means the two things that matter are cutting the power and getting it looked at quickly. Drying it out on a shelf is not neutral: corrosion progresses while it sits, and the residue left behind by evaporating water, especially salt water or anything sugary, keeps attacking the board after the moisture has gone.
Emergency
Water damaged NAS
If your NAS has got wet, 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
Water reaching a NAS is normally water arriving from above, in a cupboard or a rack under a leak, and it lands on the top of the chassis and runs down through several drives and a power supply at once. The drives themselves are individually sealed in the way any hard drive is, so their platters are usually dry, but the unit distributes the problem across every member simultaneously and the power supply is often the first casualty. The array metadata is safe on the disks; the appliance around it may not be.
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.
Corrosion on the circuit board
Progressive, and it continues while the device sits waiting. This is why a water job is genuinely time-sensitive in a way most other failures are not.
Short circuit from powering it on wet
Often the actual killer rather than the water itself. Components survive immersion and then fail on power-up.
Sealed platters, untouchedbetter news
The platter chamber is sealed at the factory and vented only through a filter. Water frequently reaches the exterior and the circuit board and stops there, leaving the recorded surface completely intact.
What to check first on a NAS
- Cut the power at the wall rather than shutting down through the interface, and leave it off.
- Label every disk with its bay number before removing any of them, then take them out so they can dry individually.
- Look at each drive's circuit board for water marks and residue, and note which ones are affected.
What not to do
Do not power the unit back up to see whether the volume mounts. If several boards are wet, powering up risks damaging multiple members at the same moment, and simultaneous loss of two members is the scenario most array configurations cannot survive.
Try this before you pay anyone
There is one thing to do, and several popular things not to
- Take it off power. If it is a phone, take it off the charger and do not press the power button to check.
- If it is still wet, keep it that way rather than letting it dry with residue in place, because a device that dries with contamination on the board corrodes underneath it. Get it to someone quickly instead.
- Note what the liquid was. Salt water, pool water, and anything sugary are substantially more aggressive than clean tap water, and it changes how the board has to be treated.
Skip the rice. It cannot reach the inside of a sealed device, it does nothing for corrosion already underway, and it costs the days that decide a water job. A hair dryer drives moisture further in and can lift components. Neither of these is a small mistake. They are the two that most often turn a recoverable water job into an unrecoverable one.
How recoverable this is
Better than most people expect, and it degrades with every day of delay. On hard drives the platter chamber is sealed, so the recorded surface is often perfectly intact and the work is on everything around it. On phones and SSDs the memory package frequently survives a board that does not. What consistently makes the difference is elapsed time and whether it was powered on while wet.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- How long since it got wet, and whether it has been powered since
- What the liquid was: salt, pool and sugary liquids are far more aggressive
- Whether corrosion has reached the storage itself or is confined to the surrounding board
- Whether the sealed enclosure kept the liquid out of the head and platter chamber
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
from $690
RAID, NAS and servers
Arrays rebuilt from the member disks rather than trusting the controller that failed. Any filesystem, including ext4, Btrfs, ZFS and VMFS.
What moves a job within its band: capacity, how much of the media is unstable, whether the filesystem is encrypted, and how much of the drive has to be read before the files you need are reachable. You get one fixed figure after the assessment and it does not move afterwards. If we can’t recover what matters to you, there is no recovery fee.
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.