“Thanks for the return of our data. Fortunately, all of the important files were undamaged following the failure of our RAID array. Excellent service. Very fast and kept us informed at all stages.”
Peter Gough, Surrey Quays
We received a RAID array containing four 2TB Seagate hard disk drives at our Fleet Street office in London. An examination of the drives revealed that one of them had suffered a fault, while the other three were operating correctly. The failed drive had suffered a failure of the electronics on the controller board, causing it fail, which had taken the RAID array offline.
It is most likely that the fault on the failed drive had been caused by overheating, often through insufficient airflow across the drive. Our hardware disk recovery specialists were able to overcome the problem with the drive controller board using donor parts. This allowed our data recovery engineers to secure sector-by-sector images of each drive to our servers. During the imaging process approximately two thousand unreadable bad sectors present were found, while all of the other three drives imaged without error.
The images of the drives were examined by our data recovery specialists revealing the RAID configuration used was RAID 0 data striping. The RAID 0 architecture uses no fault tolerance hence the array went offline following the failure of the single disk. The unreadable bad sectors will also be seen by the file system, which may damage files. Our recovery specialists configured a virtual RAID 0 array, which was analysed, revealing a single 8TB XFS data volume. A scan of the file system that 2.4TB of data files were recoverable. A couple of dozen files were found to have been affected by the unrecoverable sectors. Our engineers were able to deliver the 2.4TB of recovered data to the client’s office inside two days.
