Data Recovery* Computer Forensics* Mobile Phone Forensics* Cell Site Analysis* Data Erasure.

We are getting more and more companies contacting us with problem RAID servers and RAID systems that have initiation problems.


RAID data recovery is getting more and more complex. We are getting RAID’s sent to us now that are big. Very big. Our most recent one had 24 x 300Gb SAS drives. Bizarrely* this huge array of drives* (7.2Tb) only actually held just over a Tb of data* so when the data was recovered* it was sent back on a single hard disk. It seemed to suffer from a traditional problem. A single drive fails* the IT staff will ‘fix that tomorrow’* when low and behold* another drive fails. This somewhat scuppers the concept of the built in spare drive tolerance of RAID 5 and it falls over.


We have recently successfully recovered a physically smaller RAID array* but it had 750Gb SATA hard drives in it* 19 of them in RAID 5 format* totalling 14.25Tb. In this instance* the RAID we were told was moved physically* from one place to another* then it just stopped working. Over the weeks we spent working on it* we found that the RAID had indeed been physically moved* then stopped working* however* we were not told that the ‘techies’ had re-initiated the RAID* then again* then again in a RAID 6 format* then again in RAID 5 format totalling six re-initialisations in 3 different RAID formats.

At each stage of the recovery* our engineers were hoping that we were going to be successful only to find that the RAID was still failed. Each time* the engineers were taking a step back to the original problem. All in all* this extra work added a further 4 weeks work to the recovery.

All this extra work ended up costing the client a lot more money. The lesson here from a management perspective is to firstly accept that your staff are likely not to be experts in RAID recovery and never let them ‘have a go’* as sometimes this can make the data irretrievable. This means that the most likely thing that can happen is the techies are likely to make matters worse for the recovery engineers* (even though they mean well).

It was shocking to find how relieved the client was when we allowed them to view their own data. Its great PR except that the data in question was very confidential* holding government data. At the risk of shocking you* we were not allowed to disclose who the client was!

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