A stripe across two drives keeps no second copy, so recovering the dead member was the whole task.
For the sheer speed of it, a video production outfit kept its working storage on a two-disk RAID 0. That speed comes at a price: a stripe writes half of everything to each disk and holds nothing back — no mirror, no parity — so the array is only ever as alive as both of its drives at once. When one of the pair suffered a head fault, the volume went down instantly and there was nothing internal to lean on. The entire recovery, then, came down to resurrecting that one failed drive.
Of the two disks, one was fine and the other had a failed head that ruled out any reading until it had been through the clean room. That order was forced on us: a stripe can’t be reassembled while any member is incomplete, so until the damaged drive had been recovered as far as it possibly could be, there was nothing to rebuild — every sector it lost would be a sector missing from the finished volume.
We rescued the failed drive first. Matched donor heads went in under clean-air conditions, and the drive was then read gently on a DeepSpar, the strong surfaces secured before the weak ones were coaxed in staged passes, with the PC3000 for firmware. Its partner cloned without incident. Now holding a full copy of each, we established the block size and which drive led the stripe, and rebuilt the array in software by interleaving the two copies in their correct order until the file system resolved.
From the rebuilt stripe we confirmed the outfit’s footage and project files opened and played back correctly, then delivered everything on fresh media.
Once reassembled, the volume gave up the great majority of its footage and project files, seven working days on. RAID 0’s hard lesson is that it works against you, not for you: without any redundancy, the failure of either disk erases the whole array, so it belongs under working data only, never as the one copy of anything.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — the failed drive rescued with donor heads in the clean area, both disks then cloned and the stripe reassembled. The originals are only ever read, 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.
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Usually, yes, though RAID 0 keeps no redundancy, so it hinges on recovering the failed drive. We repair and image the dead member — clean-room work if a head has gone — then reassemble the stripe from full copies of both disks.
From £500 plus VAT, most jobs no fix, no fee, with a fixed quote up front.
Not necessarily, but don’t keep powering a failed drive or try to rebuild the array. The data can usually be recovered by imaging both disks and rebuilding the stripe; switch it off, label the disks, and send them in.
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.