Retrodata RAID Recovery

All modern RAID systems are designed to be fairly intelligent; if a hard drive failed, they can be configured to send a text or an email (or both) to the RAID administrator. If they are so configured, they will automatically “drop” the failed drive and, running in degraded mode (depending how the RAID was set up) will slowly rebuild the RAID from the remaining disks, incorporating the new disk into a healthy array.

RAID rebuild is a long process, taking anything from a few hours for a small array, to a number of days for a large system. But because one hard drive has already failed, there is a chance of another drive failing during the rebuild process – especially if all the drives were part of the same batch that may have manufacturing anomalies.

We estimate that when this happens, most of the time the RAID admin will restart the rebuild process, or replace the second failed drive with yet another replacement, and press forward without the faintest idea of the damage that is being caused to the data.

The commonest reason we see for completely unrecoverable data is down to this sort of user or IT Manager action. This is why it is so incredibly important for a professional RAID Data Recovery company such as ourselves that if a RAID array does fail, and cannot be repaired on the first run, that it is taken out of the RAID admin’s hands and delivered to us in a “virgin” failure state.. At this point, the data is almost always 100% recoverable.

It does not matter what qualifications your RAID or IT manager has; nor does it have any bearing on the situation how much RAID experience they have. They are not specialists in RAID data recovery, and their good intentions could almost certainly jeopardise your only chance of successful data retrieval.