Which NAS Brand Most Often Encountered in Data Recovery Cases – ReclaiMe Data Recovery Research

Today one of the data recovery companies offering solutions for various storage devices, ReclaiMe, has published the results of a research aimed at determining which NAS brand is most often encountered in data recovery cases.

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The research was conducted on NAS devices involving in data recovery using ReclaiMe NAS Recovery software in 2017. The research included 3,476 NAS devices and revealed that the company was most often run on Qnap Systems, Inc., Netgear, Inc. and Buffalo Technology, Inc. NAS devices. These three brands accounted for 77% (2,687 units) of the total NAS recovery cases where ReclaiMe was launched.

Qnap and Netgear together can hardly reach the Buffalo amount.

“At the end of the year it’s the most suitable time to summarize the work, so we decided to find out which devices are most often involved in data recovery with our ReclaiMe NAS Recovery software,” said Elena Pakhomova, one of co-founders, ReclaiMe Data Recovery company. “It’s important for us to keep up to date with the data recovery solutions that are in demand. Of course, solutions for external HDDs and flash drives are still in high demand; more than that, recovery algorithms for such devices almost has not changed for many years. But when it comes to complex devices like NAS, things are different – the manufacturers always strive to introduce something new – a new file system, a new technique of combining disks, etc.“

Three main NAS vendors – Qnap, Netgear and Buffalo – use different file systems in their devices. Qnap uses EXT, Netgear switched to BTRFS a couple of years ago while Buffalo sticks to XFS.

Additionally, we analyzed the amount of the recovered data in terabytes. We found that Qnap stores 16TB of data, on average, Netgear – 24TB, Buffalo – 7TB. Based on this and assuming that 3TB disks are used we concluded that a typical Netgear unit involved in NAS recovery is a eight disk device. Buffalo NAS with their 7TB per device should be two or three-disk devices.

This distribution rather means that Buffalo is more often chosen by home users to organize storage rather than points that the Buffalo devices are unreliable and, therefore, more likely to break down.

Full research