A question for hardware failure

[cowsled]

Hey guys, I'm fairly new to the idea of RAID and I had a question. If the hardware controlling RAID fails (i.e. Motherboard, RAID card and not the harddrive themselves) under RAID 0, is there any way to recover the data? Thanks

 

[rforce]

RAID 0 is also known as a stripe. The data is alternately copied between both drives in blocks. Depending on the hardware, the user can usually setup the block size to be almost any number that is an exponent of 2...usually it is defaulted to 64KB. What that means is that if one drive fails, at best, you are only able to get files that are smaller than 64KB, if you are able to recover them at all.

Running a data recovery business, this is a common occurrence where one or both of the drives fails. In most instances, we are able to stabilize the bad drive(s) long enough to duplicate them. Though, there are almost always a significant number of bad sectors. Once the drives are duplicated, we would then reconstruct the stripe set virtually and recover your files.

That all being said, it is best not to put any important data on a stripe set, unless it is backed up somewhere else. Stripes are great for gaining more space and speed, but it comes with a cost...so does the data recovery service.