RAID Data Recovery Experts

We are the UK experts in RAID data recovery and will rescue files and folders from your failed RAID array professionally and promptly, minimising your company’s downtime.

We retrieve data from all types of RAID arrays including RAID 0 data recovery, RAID 1 (failed mirror) recovery, RAID 5 recovery as well as the less common variants RAID 4 (with one drive for dedicated parity), RAID 6 and RAID 10 and others.

We cover any operating system, including the major families of Microsoft Windows Server (including Exchange and .edb databases), Apple Mac OS X Server and have successfully performed Linux RAID data recovery. Our extensive knowledge of file systems includes NTFS, HFS+, ext2, ext3, ext4, XFS and many older file systems that continue to provide faithful service. Bottom line: we can help you get your business back on its feet regardless of the RAID technology you have chosen.

State-of-the-Art RAID Recovery Systems

RAID servers are integral to your organisation’s computing infrastructure. Our heavy investment in developing state-of-the-art RAID recovery systems ensures the best possible recovery from your company’s unexpected data loss.

We also recover data from NAS devices (Network Attached Storage), across the range from two to eight disk drives.

At Tierra Data Recovery all RAID data recovery services are provided by our own experienced specialist RAID engineers.

If you want a refresher class in RAID terminology, take a look at our Guide to RAID.

Get started right away.

Our depth of RAID data recovery experience provides you with fast effective turnaround time.

We only require your RAID hard drives, not your RAID controller, so while you are waiting for the raid data recovery you can re-establish your working server ready for data population.

We can arrange to collect your RAID drives, saving you time and money.

RAID data recovery from £660 (ex VAT)

Specialist RAID Data Recovery

Call 0845 094 0027 now and speak to an experienced specialist RAID Data Recovery Engineer from the first call. We’ll walk you through the scenarios and launch the recovery process.

Expert Analysis as Standard

Get your RAID system analysed by the experts.  Tierra Data Recovery has an outstanding record of data recovery from RAID systems suffering failure.

We know that RAID owners are typically under severe time pressure with failed systems, so we make sure you are kept up-to-date while we follow best practices in preserving, analysing and recovering the lost files and folders, across all file systems.

Professional RAID Data Recovery

Our professional analysis of your RAID system will quickly identify critical files and folders.  Tierra use forensic techniques, cloning each hard drive and processing the total array as image files.

If necessary, we will reassemble any inaccessible member disks mechanical parts with donor components to enable raw sector reading. RAID recovery software will not help you in such circumstances.

After recovering the raw data the array images are analysed to identify corruptions to both true data and parity data and work begins to destripe, reconstruct and repair the file system. Tierra’s proprietary software then extracts data from the image files.

Call and speak to a specialist RAID engineer on 0845 094 0027 and get expert help from the very first call.  They will talk you through the process and give you a fixed price for your RAID data recovery.

Emergency Service

In urgent situations ask for Tierra’s Emergency Service. Experienced RAID data recovery engineers will work round the clock to complete both the analysis and the recovery. This can save several elapsed days in round-trip disaster recovery time. Critical data can be sent by email or made available as secure downloads from the Tierra website without waiting for the final full raid data recovery.

For a fixed price for RAID data recovery and to begin your RAID 0, RAID 5, RAID 6 or RAID 10 recovery call 0845 094 0027 now.

RAID Data Recovery Case Study – Buffalo TeraStation

This is a typical example of successful RAID data recovery.

TeraStation RAID Failure:

We received a call from an anxious client with a failed Buffalo TeraStation.

Buffalo TeraStation

This TeraStation was composed of four 1TB S-ATA drives in a RAID 5 configuration (therefore offering 3TB of storage array capacity). Originally drive number 4 had failed and the client had then replaced the failed drive 4 with a new hard drive. The TeraStation had then begun to re-build the volume and the client had left the unit to complete this task. On return the next morning it was found that the TeraStation was now reporting that drive number 2 had failed. This too was replaced with a new drive but the TeraStation did not proceed any further.

We arranged for immediate collection of the four original and two replacement hard drives.

The TeraStation RAID Data Recovery-Step 1:

We received hardware with the following technical specifications:

• Original drives 1 to 4: Samsung HD103UJ all manufactured on the same date
• Replacement drive for drive 4: Samsung HD103UJ (manufactured approximately 3 months after the original drives)
• Replacement drive for drive 2: Samsung HD103SJ (manufactured some years after the original drives)

The drives arrived in our lab and, as always, step one was to forensically clone all six to fresh drives. This elaborate process allows us to work without endangering the client data. As is usually the case with failed RAIDs the drives did not clone smoothly. Two of the original four drives were suffering from bad sectors. This is a common failure, especially among older and well used drives. Over time and with more and more usage the ability of the platter to maintain the electromagnetic signal that is your data wanes (just as a permanent magnet over time will slowly lose its magnetism).

All hard drives have some bad sectors and will develop more over their lifetime, they have a built-in store of spare sectors which they will allocate as bad sectors develop. However this pool of spare sectors is not infinite and once used-up the total number of usable sectors on the drive will start to decline. This can be more of a problem than may initially appear, a single unreadable sector if located at an unfortunate part of the drive can prevent the operating system from starting at all.

It may seem surprising that two drives within a set of 4 should fail almost simultaneously but perhaps it shouldn’t. It is most likely that the drives will have been produced in the same factory, on the same date and have spent their operational lifetime in the same operating conditions. Consequently the circumstances that cause one drive to fail will very likely affect the others in a similar manner.

The results of the cloning work were as follows:

• Original Drive 1- drive cloned with exception of a single sector.
• Original Drive 2- ultimately proved too damaged to clone any significant amount.
• Original Drive 3- drive cloned with the exception of a single continuous sequence of 8 sectors.
• Original Drive 4- drive cloned with the exception of a total of 16 sectors spread across 5 areas of the drive.
• Replacement for drive 4- cloned without error.
• Replacement for drive 2- cloned without error.

To put these numbers in context a 1TB drive is typically composed of 1,953,525,168 sectors. However in this as in other matters, location is everything, even a single failed sector can prove catastrophic to data recovery if it occurs in the wrong place.

With the drives cloned the originals could be put to one side and would not need to be touched again.

The TeraStation RAID Data Recovery– Step 2:

The next step was to try to rebuild the 3TB data volume. This was a RAID 5 data recovery, so we needed a minimum of 3 of the 4 drives to be accessible in order to retrieve the user data.

In this instance there were a couple of complications:

• We knew that we did not have original drive 2 it was too badly damaged to clone.
• The client had replaced original drive 4 when the first failure occurred; at this point the TeraStation began to re-build the volume. We do not know how far it got before original drive 2 failed and the re-build stopped. Consequently we did not know which combination of our clones would provide the best approach to getting the data.

The client stated that when original drive 2 was replaced the Terastation did not appear to make any attempt to re-build the volume. The next logical step was to examine the clone of the replacement drive 2, it was in fact found to be completely empty and so could be eliminated from any further consideration.

This now left us with: Original drives 1 and 3 and two clones for drive 4 (the original and replacement).

In order to proceed we needed to decide which of the 2 drive 4 clones would be the better to use with drives 1 and 3 in order to attempt to re-build the storage volume.

A hex editor examination of both of the drive 4 clones was inconclusive; both had significant amounts of data. The way forward would be to rebuild the 3TB storage volume twice, once with each of the drive 4 clones and compare the results.

The TeraStation RAID Data Recovery– Step 3:

The next task was to deduce drive order, striping size and parity arrangement in use for this RAID 5 configuration (of these, stripe size is the easiest to determine and parity arrangement the hardest). With RAID arrays in general, while the array slots are numbered sequentially, this pattern is not necessarily reflected internally.

This was done again using a hex editor to determine how the data had been split across the 3 drives. Once this had been determined then the next task was to re-build the 3TB volume. This would be done twice. First using the original drive 4 and then replacing it with the replacement for drive 4.

The file system in use was XFS, this is a widely used file system for NAS devices. Interestingly both re-build attempts demonstrated a complete looking file tree. Full directory structure and file names were present whichever of the drive 4 clones had been used. However when the data was sampled by selectively pulling files and confirming that they were intact it was found that original drive 4 did not return any corrupted files whereas less than 1 in 3 of the files sampled from the 3TB volume re-built using the replacement drive 4 clone were intact.

Step 4 – Data Recovered:

We now concentrated on the RAID rebuild using the original drives 1, 3 and 4. There proved to be small amount of file system damage resulting in the loss of a handful of files but ultimately a success rate in excess of 99% for the original client data, including (crucially) all critical files. The rescued data was immediately supplied on an encrypted external hard drive to a very relieved customer.

To get started on your RAID data recovery, contact us using the short form on the left or email us or simply call us now on 0845 094 0027 or 0131 663 4137. Our RAID data recovery experts are waiting for your call.