⚠ Do now
Free tool · Rebuild or stop?
A rebuild is the hardest work an array ever does. Answer a few questions and the checker tells you whether a careful rebuild looks reasonable, whether to hold off, or whether to stop and call.
Do you have a current, tested backup of everything on the array?Tested means you have restored files from it recently. A copy on the same NAS does not count.
Did it start after a power cut, a surge or the unit being moved?Storms, a flat UPS and a bump while running all count.
Is any drive clicking, beeping or very slow?Or reporting bad sectors, or making the whole unit slow to respond.
Are the drives older than about three years, or were they bought together?Same age and same batch usually means the same wear.
Has anyone already tried a rebuild, repair or initialise, or pulled and reinserted drives?Including a NAS repair wizard, chkdsk or fsck, or accepting a foreign configuration.
Is the data business-critical?Accounts, client files, databases, anything you cannot recreate.
Start with the RAID level, how many drives are out and whether you have a tested backup. Any question you skip counts as Not sure.
A guide based on your answers, not a diagnosis. It cannot see your drives, and it cannot tell you whether data is recoverable. When in doubt, stop and ask: a rebuild that fails part-way is much harder to recover than one that was never started.
Read what the array reports first → Label the drives before they move →
Questions
Only when exactly one drive is out, the others are healthy and the data is already safe somewhere else. A rebuild reads every remaining drive end to end, and if another drive is weak, that is when it fails.
Stop. A rebuild that fails part-way is much harder to recover than one that was never started. Do not start it again; call before anything else is written to the drives.
No. It is a guide based on your answers, not a diagnosis. It cannot see your drives.
Stop using the array. If it is still running, shut it down from its admin page, or with the maker’s short power-button press, never at the wall. Label each drive with its bay number before anything is removed, and do not rebuild, repair, initialise or swap drives. Then call 1300 806 557.
The answer was stop
Our lab images every drive before any rebuild, then works from the copies.