“Thanks for the fast and efficient service, after our RAID server failed.”
Dean Stock, Avroscan Ltd, Horsham
A RAID array containing ten 1TB disks arrived at our data recovery lab in Oxford, after the client data became inaccessible. The cause of the failure was due to the loss of the RAID configuration settings, probably caused by a power surge. Nine of the ten disks were imaged without any problems, but the other had suffered a failure of the on-board electronics, giving credence to a power surge causing the failure. We were able to overcome the problem, but it was soon apparent that this drive had already been suffering a drive motor issue; imaging would take a long time.
While our disk recovery engineers worked on the damaged disk, our RAID recovery specialists were given the images of the other nine disks. It was soon apparent that the configuration had parity information, and the remaining disk may not be required for a successful recovery. Further analysis revealed that we were dealing with a RAID 50 configuration, in which data is striped across two RAID 5 arrays. Once our engineers had determined the configuration and set-up a virtual RAID array, we were able to recover the data, without the need of the image from the damaged drive.
