NAS Recovery Research

At the end of 2017, we have analyzed telemetry data collected during the year focusing on the data recovery cases involving NAS devices. Being data recovery software providers, we are interested in knowing which NAS storage devices are more often involved in data recovery, how much TB of data is usually stored on such devices and, most important, the recovery success rate over the NAS models.

Which NAS brands

Based on the collected data, in 2017 ReclaiMe NAS Recovery software was launched on 3476 NAS devices. 177 units were QNAP devices, 952 units - NETGEAR, 1558 - Buffalo. The number of NASes from other manufacturers was 789 units.

How much data was recovered

The research revealed that ReclaiMe successfully extracted 37145 TB of data stored on NAS devices (QNAP, NETGEAR, and Buffalo). 2945 TB of the total amount were recovered from QNAP, 22857 TB — from NETGEAR and 11343 TB – from Buffalo.

Knowing the number of the devices of each manufacturer and total amount of the recovered data, we can get an average capacity of a NAS device. We found that QNAP stores 16TB on average, NETGEAR – 24 TB, Buffalo – 7 TB.

We can conclude that NETGEAR is usually a multi-bay device, while Buffalo is a two- or three-disk unit.

As we know, NAS devices use the RAID technology to combine disks into a single storage. Having analyzed 7882 RAID configurations (this number includes both software RAIDs on NASes and hardware RAIDs), we found out that most popular types are RAID0, RAID 5, RAID6, and RAID10. The more detailed result is the following:

Such a large number of data recovery cases associated with RAID0 is most likely due to the fact that the Buffalo LinkStation Duo devices use RAID0 level by default.

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