A stripe across two drives has no redundancy — recovering the failed member was the whole job.
A video production setup ran its working storage as a two-disk RAID 0 for the speed it brings. RAID 0 stripes data across both disks with no redundancy at all — no parity, no second copy — so it's fast but utterly unforgiving. When one of the two drives developed a head fault, the whole volume went down with it, and there was nothing within the array to fall back on. Recovering the failed drive wasn't a part of this job; it was the entire job.
We assessed both disks. One was healthy; the other had a failing head and needed full clean-room work before it could be read. Because a RAID 0 is only ever as complete as every one of its members, the volume couldn't be reassembled at all until the failed drive had been recovered as fully as possible — anything missing from it would be missing from the finished result.
We recovered the failed member first. In our clean-air environment we fitted matched donor heads, then imaged the drive gently on a DeepSpar Disk Imager — securing the healthy surfaces first and taking the weak areas in controlled passes — with the PC3000 for firmware. The healthy disk imaged straightforwardly. With complete images of both drives in hand, we worked out the stripe (block) size and the disk order, then reassembled the array in software, interleaving the two images correctly so the file system could be read.
From the reassembled volume we checked the production's footage and project files opened and played correctly, then returned it all on fresh media.
With the stripe rebuilt we recovered the volume's data — the great majority of the footage and project files — across seven working days. The hard truth about RAID 0 is that it doubles your risk rather than cutting it: with no redundancy, either disk failing loses the lot, so it should only ever hold working data that's backed up elsewhere.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — imaging and recovery carried out in-house. Every job is imaged before any recovery work begins, and the original media is never written to.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Getting your data back begins with getting the device to us. Pack it up safely, pop your contact details inside, and send it over — once we’ve run the free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work starts.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is what we’d recommend. Rather drop it in? You’re welcome Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just package the device up as above first.
Want a bit more detail first? Fill in the form with more about your issue and an engineer will review it and send you a custom quote.
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Yes — any level, controller or failed rebuild. We image every member disk read-only, recover the parameters, then rebuild the array virtually from the copies.
From £500 plus VAT, with no fix, no fee on most jobs and a fixed quote up front; emergency round-the-clock service is available too.
No. A failed rebuild is the single most common cause of permanent loss. Stop, pull the drives labelled with their bay order, and send them to us.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.