NAS health check & storage audit: is your NAS one power cut from a bad week?
Our NAS health check is a tool-neutral storage audit for plants that depend on CAD, ERP and shared drives. Most plant storage was sized once and never revisited. We audit capacity, RAID rebuild exposure, Smart Fetch performance, endurance and backup integrity — then tell you, in writing, what to fix first.
The questions your storage should answer.
Capacity & growth
- Utilisation against the 70–80% threshold for CAD/CAM working sets
- Growth trend and runway
- Snapshot and version overhead
Resilience
- RAID 5 rebuild risk and migration path to RAID 6 / RAIDZ2
- Disk health and SMART history
- UPS integration protecting the fast tier
Performance
- Smart Fetch readiness: fast-tier size vs. working set
- Metadata pinning to flash
- 1GbE bottlenecks, multichannel file sharing, 10GbE readiness
Endurance
- SSD terabytes written (TBW) vs. rated endurance
- Fast-tier mode suitability (read vs. read-write)
Protection
- Snapshot schedules and immutability
- Offsite replication status and lag
- A real restore test, not a green tick
Access
- Share permissions vs. directory groups
- Exposure to vendor or guest networks
Smart Fetch: a performance boost engineers feel.
With a correctly designed Smart Fetch tier, the mechanical disks barely see random I/O. It increases efficiency by 90% and productivity by more than 60%, as delivered at a laser fabrication plant and a filtration-machinery manufacturer on 8 TB and 24 TB active working sets.
See the 40 TB CAD storage caseFrequently asked questions
What does a NAS health check include?
Disk health and error counters, RAID state and rebuild exposure, capacity thresholds, firmware, UPS-triggered shutdown, snapshot and backup verification, access permissions and CAD/CAM performance under real load.
Why are our CAD files slow to open from the NAS?
Usually random-read latency on mechanical disks, an overloaded single link, or permissions and antivirus scanning on large assemblies. The audit measures which one it is before recommending anything.
Will the audit disrupt production?
No. Measurements are read-only and scheduled around shifts. Any change we recommend is planned for a maintenance window.
Do you only work with one storage brand?
No. We are tool-neutral: findings and recommendations apply to whichever storage platform you run.
Find out before the disk does.
Fixed scope. Written, prioritised report.