RAID makes one promise — that the array survives a disk dying — and Glasgow’s server rooms mostly believe it means more than it does. Parity buys you time to replace a disk; it is not a second copy of anything. When the promise runs out mid-rebuild, what you own is a maths problem spread across several damaged drives, and the worst possible tool for a maths problem is optimism.
Nearly every RAID catastrophe we unpick had a survivable beginning: one disk down, array degraded, data still live. What converted it into a disaster was insistence — a rebuild that stalled and was restarted, a second disk that faltered under rebuild load, a controller swapped “to see”, an initialise accepted at 2am. Each attempt writes to the very disks the answer must be computed from.
So the rule is short enough to remember under pressure: one failure, one attempt, then hands off. An array that stops being touched almost always keeps its data. An array that keeps being rescued rarely does.
Real RAID recovery never trusts the controller and never works on the members. Each drive — including the “failed” ones, which are often only tired — is imaged individually, weak areas read last and gently. Then the array is reconstructed virtually from those images: disk order, block size, rotation and parity solved from the data’s own patterns, not from a config that may itself be the casualty. Stale members are spotted by their timestamps and excluded before they can poison the result.
Only when the virtual array mounts and the file system checks out does anything get copied off. The original disks are never gambled; they’re the evidence.
Striped RAID 0 with no safety net, mirrors that quietly ran on one leg for months, RAID 5 after the second failure, RAID 6 after the third, nested 10s, and every hardware and software controller in between — Dell PERC, HP Smart Array, mdadm, Windows Storage Spaces. Controllers fail too, and a controller that “can’t see the array” says nothing about the disks behind it. Bring or send every member, in any order, labelled or not — the imaging step doesn’t care, and the maths finds the order for itself.
Multi-disk work starts at £500 + VAT and is quoted to the job, because every member disk is imaged individually before the array itself is touched — more disks, more careful hours. Every job starts with a free diagnostic and ends the same way it was quoted: the figure goes in writing before a single sector is read, and on most jobs there is nothing to pay unless your data comes back. No hourly meter, no surprise “evaluation fee”, no percentage of what the files are worth.
If you want the levels in plain English — and the specific way each one dies — the guide to RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 is the honest version, written from the arrays that arrive here.
No — it’s the textbook worst case, but “failed” disks are frequently just weak, and one of them can usually be imaged well enough to complete the set. With one full image recovered from a marginal member plus the healthy drives, the parity maths closes. It becomes fatal mainly when rebuild attempts have overwritten the marginal disk first.
The rebuild was writing new parity across the array when it hit something it couldn’t read, and it stopped mid-thought — leaving members that half-agree with each other. Do not restart it. We image everything and reconstruct the pre-rebuild state from the portions each disk still holds; a second rebuild attempt is what turns this recoverable mess into a permanent one.
Not to us. Order, stripe size, parity rotation and offset all leave fingerprints in the data itself, and solving them from the images is a standard part of the job. Labels help morale more than they help the maths — send the drives however they come out of the box.
Yes, and usually without replacing the card at all — the data doesn’t live in the controller. We image the members and rebuild the array in software, which sidesteps the risky game of hunting an identical controller and hoping it adopts the set rather than initialising it.
Two honest routes, no vans. Hand the device in at Tay House, 300 Bath Street — right at Charing Cross, two minutes off the M8 — Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm. Or wrap it well and send it by insured, tracked post from Paisley, Ayrshire, the Highlands or anywhere else in the UK. Either way the work is done in-house by our own engineers, with a documented chain of custody, and your data never leaves the UK.
Arrays reach us from every corner of the country — our data recovery UK service takes the full disk set by insured courier of your choosing on exactly the walk-in terms: free assessment, written quote, no fee on most jobs without a recovery.
Pull the members, resist the second attempt, and get the whole set to Bath Street by hand or insured courier of your choosing — posted in, never collected, and solved from copies. RAID data recovery for Glasgow that treats parity as evidence, not a promise.