How to reconnect a disk already setup for the NAS, but removed.

Hi,
newbie question. I am new to QNAP although I have been a tech for a long time.

I have just acquired a QNAP TS-419U II and it’s role is simply to be network storage. Although I am a tech, we are now running a videography business and we constantly run out of storage so at the moment the aim is to increase the available capacity. Last week’s jobs created 1 TB of data. The volumes of data we go through actually make backing up etc. a logistical problem.

Also a part of the story is an 8TB disk failed recently and we currently only have the backup available, and that backup is part of the problem for this story.

A Seagate 8TB drive was corrupted by a failing SATA port on the server. I found a used TS-419U II and put an WD 8TB in it. Over the course of a week, the corrupted files were recovered and copied to the WD sitting in the NAS, and we have been able to access them as required, barring Apple’s finicky network connections! We couldn’t save the original drive so that is the only copy.

Last week, a red light showed up on the NAS, but we had to get work out and we could access the files we needed so I pushed it off to this week to fix the red light. Now it starts getting convoluted. The problem was with a 1 TB drive and the error msg said to run a “bad block” check. In trying to do this, the NAS rebooted, and started down the initialisation track. When the message about reformatting came up, I didn’t want to lose the 8TB data, so I took it out, and the 1TB problem drive, and put the older Seagate 8TB in. That worked well for the initialisation - the corruption was cleared and we had a usable drive again.

I put the WD 8TB back in. QNAP app recognised the drive correctly, but did not mount it. Said it had 0 capacity and 0 bytes used. The panic meter starts ratcheting up. I shut down the NAS and took the WD drive out. Put it into a caddy and connected it to the original files server - Ubuntu 24. It connected without drama and all the files appeared to be there. Put it back into the NAS but it was still appearing as a blank drive.

How do I get the WD 8TB drive working as it was last week?

My back up process would be to connect it to the file server again and copy from there to the Seagate 8TB now sitting in the NAS, but I can see that taking a long time. For one thing, the caddy is USB 2. I do need to work on the projects that are on that drive so the sooner I can get them reliably available the better. I am really hoping for a quick solution as the previous exercise had a lot more twists and turns that I haven’t mentioned and the whole lot had us being non-operational for 4 weeks. I really don’t want to go there again.

All help appreciated.
Thanks, Darryl

IT Equipment:
QNAP TS-419U II currently with 1 x 8TB WD
Apple Studio workstation
Various Win 11 laptops
3 x Ubuntu servers (1 file server, 1 file/web server, 1 network manager)
1 x 16 port Unifi switch
1 x 8 port Unifi swith
1 x Edgerouter X

I guess it’s all single disks…and no backups? …risky business…even more so with these 16+ year old ancient NAS devices.

Take the disk out of the NAS and read the data in a Linux PC or ext reader in windows.

Implement a storage strategy on a new device that can handle arrays of more than 16TB and implement RAID5 or higher and don’t forget your backups. (no more sweating when disks fail)

So the implication is that the disk is now useless on the NAS even though it formatted and wrote it, and is readable in a Linux server. It’s not giving me a lot of confidence in it’s reliability and I thought it would be easier than setting up another Linux file server.

This server is veeeery old (~16 years) so confidence in it should be low to begin with.

You should always run RAID 5/6/10 in these units but due to the volume size limitation, you cannot do this with these disk sizes.

I am at the end of the road now with this NAS. I re-installed everything from scratch. Copied over 2 folders that were needed for current jobs. Now it has repeated the story - doesn’t recognise disks that it previously recognised and is claiming it needs to be initialised - again. Way too finicky for me to deal with at the moment - I cannot trust something that works and then stops working for no apparent reason.
This is a problem I don’t have time for, so QNAP is going and I will find another option.