Remove Drive from NAS, Test on Windows

Question

I would like to remove a drive from a NAS that is part of a RAID. The aim is just to test it.

Use case 1: e.g. QNAP

Bought a new drive, I created a first RAID1, but I forgot to test. Now I want to do the "initial" extended and surface testing with HDSentinel. This appears to be far more detailed than the default QNAP testing.

Use Case2: e.g. Synology

A few read errors on a RAID5, again I want to do some extended and surface read testing.

Questions

May Windows testing programs like HDSentinel, Seatools, WDDiag destroy data on this UNIX NAS drives, when I do read-only tests ? Or may I simply remove the drive from the NAS, keep the NAS shut down, test on Windows and reinsert the drive? Is there an alternative on NAS for more thorough testing than the QNAP/Synology extended test? In the meantime I have discovered the following:

a) QNAP has a clearly defined system volume. Image of System volume

Apparently a removal of this system volume risk to destroy the content.

b) If one creates a storage pool that is not on the system volume, then one could remove the disk without problems. Image of Remove storage pool not on system volume

I will now remove the system volume, given that on my QNAP I do not have data yet.

This, however, is different for my Synology NAS. Here I cannot identify the system volume and I am still waiting for help.

Answer 1

It depends on the tooling, but if it says it's going to do read-only tests, I'm gonna assume that it's read-only, so it wouldn't destroy any data. You need to be careful that Windows doesn't try to format the drive or tries to write a partition table on it. That could destroy data and/or make it inaccessible. Windows will ask you for something like "initialization", don't do this.

You might want to check your sources on that the removal of a system volume would lead to data loss on QNAP. QNAP is a well-respected NAS vendor, and they must have some redundancy in place to prevent data loss in case of a single drive failure.

In fact, for Synology, I'm sure of this. I've had all drives in a 5-bay Synology (with RAID 5) fail over time and the system never even blinked. I would just insert a new drive, the system would sync and it would all be good.