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 gives. RAID 0 stripes data across both disks with no redundancy whatsoever — there is no parity and no second copy — so it is fast but completely unforgiving. When one of the two drives developed a head fault, the entire volume went down with it, and there was no fallback within the array to lean on. Recovering the failed drive wasn't part of the job here; it was the whole 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 as complete as every one of its members, the volume could not be reassembled at all until the failed drive had been recovered as fully as possible — any data missing from it would be missing from the final 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 handling the weak areas in controlled passes, with the PC3000 for firmware. The healthy disk was imaged straightforwardly. With complete images of both drives, we determined the stripe (block) size and the order of the disks and reassembled the array in software, interleaving the two images correctly so the file system could be read.
From the reassembled volume we confirmed the production's footage and project files opened and played correctly, then returned everything on fresh media.
With the stripe rebuilt we recovered about 97% of the volume — the great majority of the footage and project files — over seven working days. The hard truth about RAID 0 is that it doubles your risk rather than reducing it: with no redundancy, either disk failing loses everything, so it should only ever be used for working data that is 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.
Recovering your data starts with getting the device to us. Pack it safely, add your contact details, and send it over — after we run a free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work begins.
Posting it in? We recommend a tracked, insured service. Prefer to drop it off? You’re welcome Monday–Friday, 9am–5:30pm — please still package the device as above.
If you need more information on our data recovery service, fill out the form with more detail about your issue and an engineer will review it and give you a custom quote.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0117 332 1137.
Yes — any level, controller or failed rebuild. We image every member disk read-only, recover the parameters, and reconstruct the array virtually from the copies.
From £500 plus VAT, no fix, no fee on most jobs, with a fixed quote up front; emergency, round-the-clock service is available.
No. A failed rebuild is the most common cause of permanent loss. Stop, remove 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.