Hard drive crashed in a Raid 0 setup

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Aug 16, 2006
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5
I need help. I have one WD raptor 74GB and three W2500SB hard drive. I use the Raptor as the boot up with programs and the other three as a data hard drive. The three are in a Raid 0 setup. One of the three HD has faulted and I can no longer get acress to the data files. It doesn't appear in XP and in the raid setup menu it says that all three HD are incomplete. Beyond that I haven't done anything to it. I wanted to get some advice first before doing anything major. Does anyone have any recommandations???
 
Welcome to the wonderful world of Raid0.

If one of the harddrives is borked to the point that you can't get the data off... then you are SOL.

Did you learn your lesson?
 
well, depending on the value of the data, recovery companies are likely to be able to get most of it back, depending on how badly the drive broke. It will cost a certain amount of money.

Just a random question that your username demands I ask: are you trolling or do you seriously have a problem?
 
I seriously have a problem and now Raid 0 is making me pretty darn sad :( (and other more angry emotions :mad: ). Well, I just want to try and get the data off the two hard drives that still work. Is there anyway of looking at the two hard drives outside of the RAID 0 configuration?
 
no, you pretty much lost your data unless you want to pay out the ass to have a data recovery expert look at it... but there are chances they wouldn't be able to recovery anything and you would be out a few grand...

raid0 is good for some things but ALWAYS backup regularly when you use it.

A good rule of thumb is do not keep anything on a raid0 volume that you would not be prepared to lose.
 
You clearly didnt read all of the warnings on raid 0 - BACKUP OFTEN or your screwed.

never keep important info on a raid 0 array, EVER, unless your doing regualr back ups.
 
MrGuvernment said:
You clearly didnt read all of the warnings on raid 0 - BACKUP OFTEN or your screwed.

never keep important info on a raid 0 array, EVER, unless your doing regualr back ups.


QFT Sucks hard this happened to you bud.
 
RAID0_MAKES_ME_SAD said:
I seriously have a problem and now Raid 0 is making me pretty darn sad :( (and other more angry emotions :mad: ). Well, I just want to try and get the data off the two hard drives that still work. Is there anyway of looking at the two hard drives outside of the RAID 0 configuration?

There is no usable data on the other two drives. Every single file that you put onto the array is split between the three drives. You have access to roughly two thirds of each and every file you had on that array.

Unless you pay to have the data recovered off of the dead drive (which costs $$$$$ and isn't a sure thing) you are SOL.

Did you learn your lesson?
 
As you know Raid 0 looks at all 3 drives as one drive, so if you lose one drive you lost all 3, and because you data is scattered accross all 3 in no real logical order you will not be able to get all of it back. You might want to see if spinright can recover some of it, but odds are you are screwed. This is why doing regular backups to multiple places is very important, and if you didnt while running a Raid 0 you were asking for this.
 
3 drives on raid0 doesn't even make sense... 3 drives would have made a better raid5 or something... you lose a little space but it is still fast and you have parity.
 
Listen carefully.

Imagine a file. With a 3 drive raid0 array, the file is split into 3 pieces and one piece is saved on each drive.

You have lost one of your drives. One third of every single file on the array is gone.

You cannot destripe because the array is dead.

Your situation is like this: You take a pie and cut it into three pieces. You take each of the three pieces and put it into a different cabinet in your kitchen. One of the pieces gets eaten by mice.

You decide that you want your whole pie pack. You can't have it, can you? One third of your pie is gone. It will never be a whole pie again.

Unless you can pay someone to get your broken harddrive working again EVERYTHING IS GONE FOREVER. There is no way around it.

Sorry man, but THERE IS NO WAY TO GET THE DATA BACK short of sending the drives off to a restoration company, which will be very expensive.

There is NO WAY to get your data back without getting the broken drive fixed. NO WAY.
 
Your only alternative really is a data recovery company. They would need to mount the drive in something, get it going so they can read the drive, take an image of the drive, restore it on something else and hope they could rebuild the array.

Have I made a post today that tells how silly it is for a regular desktop user to use RAID-0. I think the OP should message people who insist on using this for no good reason and convince them otherwise.
 
Yeah no problem. When they say that adding two drives doubles your chance of losing data, and that adding three drives triples your chances of losing data due to hard drive failure, etc. they really mean it.

Next time do RAID5 - you have enough drives (just requires 3) and it allows you to lose one drive and use the other two to rebuild the files lost on it. Or if you can - RAID6 so you can lose 2 drives. Very, very cool...
 
I'm surprised no one has asked, but what exactly is wrong with your drive? Does it power up? If it spins and isn't making any kind of strange noises then something on the board probably went bad.

In that case, if you can find another drive with the same version of the board (try to get one with a manufacturer date as close as possible to yours) then you can swap them and possibly get your data back. Of course, if that doesn't work, then you've just borked two drives...
 
litkaj said:
I'm surprised no one has asked, but what exactly is wrong with your drive? Does it power up? If it spins and isn't making any kind of strange noises then something on the board probably went bad.

In that case, if you can find another drive with the same version of the board (try to get one with a manufacturer date as close as possible to yours) then you can swap them and possibly get your data back. Of course, if that doesn't work, then you've just borked two drives...
good point.

op - there are many makeshift "fixes" for non responding drives.

from simple tapping, to refrigeration, to swapping platters etc that hit the whole range on the ghetto scale.
 
and theoretically, you can recover all files, whose size is < (stripe size), provided that their MFT entry is on a stripe that you have :D
 
saw this on a blog today:

IMAGE0022.jpg


well that sucks... the pic was funny... it isn't showing.
 
TMan1876 said:
Welcome to the wonderful world of Raid0.

If one of the harddrives is borked to the point that you can't get the data off... then you are SOL.
How is the "wonderful world of RAID0" any different than the world of JBOD? If you have a single disk drive, all alone, that is borked to the point that you can't get the data off ... then your are SOL. Using RAID or not, if you don't have a backup, you're running naked.
 
mikeblas said:
How is the "wonderful world of RAID0" any different than the world of JBOD? If you have a single disk drive, all alone, that is borked to the point that you can't get the data off ... then your are SOL. Using RAID or not, if you don't have a backup, you're running naked.

But with raid0 if one out of how ever many drives you have in the array gets borked... you lose everything. Assuming the chances that any one drive will fail remains constant,... the probability that one drive out of three will fail is much larger.

I don't run jbod, and I keep my important files on multiple drives. There is no reason to run 3x250gb harddrives in raid0 as your *storage* drive.

The wonderful world of raid0 is a world where 95% of people haven't the foggiest notion the risks that they are running with their data, and have no idea what applications raid0 will benefit.

I will admit, my last system had raid0 for the system drives... I never felt the difference going back to independant drives. I realized that it wasn't worth the trouble.

Yes, there is a risk of losing data no matter what you do. Anything can happen, your best bet is to have a good backup strategy, but you can't deny that running a raid0 array as your sole storage medium with no backup is worse than running a single disk with no backup.
 
TMan1876 said:
There is no reason to run 3x250gb harddrives in raid0 as your *storage* drive.
I don't think I agree, but I'm not perfectly certain what you mean by "*storage* drive".

TMan1876 said:
but you can't deny that running a raid0 array as your sole storage medium with no backup is worse than running a single disk with no backup.
Sure I can: they're equally unacceptable.
 
mikeblas said:
I don't think I agree, but I'm not perfectly certain what you mean by "*storage* drive".

Sure I can: they're equally unacceptable.

Raid0 is good for a temporary scratch drive. If you work with large files (non-linear video editing for example) then it is perfectly reasonable to have a couple drives striped together. But you don't use a raid 0 array for long term storage. You have to back up your files onto something. Where do you keep your important files? Are they on the same disk as all of your program files? I'd bet not. That is what I mean by "storage drive." Ya know how people will have a drive for their OS and programs, and then a drive (or drives) where they store their non-program files?

I'm not talking about acceptable and unacceptable, I'm talking about risk. If you value your data, neither is a good solution, but a 3 drive stripe is worse.

Different situations give varying degrees of necessary redundancy. Who are you to say what is acceptable and unacceptable for everyone?

Do you have multiple onsite and offsite backup for all of your important data? If you don't then people could say that your setup was "unacceptable." Is it unacceptable for you? Obviously not, or you wouldn't be using your system.
 
TMan1876 said:
Different situations give varying degrees of necessary redundancy. Who are you to say what is acceptable and unacceptable for everyone?
Sure. Similarly, how can you claim one is worse than the other, or that there are no reasons to use a particular configuration?

I think my points are getting blown away in your swirling rhetoric and irrelevant questions. I'll give up on tilting at the windmill of adding sense to this thread and let you carry on.
 
mikeblas said:
Sure. Similarly, how can you claim one is worse than the other, or that there are no reasons to use a particular configuration?

I can claim that one is worse than the other because of LOGIC.

With a single drive there is a chance of failure. Right? Can we agree on that?

If you use three of those drives in a situation where one drive failing means all of the data is lost, then the risk of losing all of the data is greater in that situation than if you just used the drives separately.

If you could possibly expand on your position as opposed to spouting one liners and then pretending like any idea that takes more than 8 words to express has to be bullshit.

I use words to try to make you understand your position, and you pick out a sentence and respond to that...
 
Why do you assume that losing all of the data is worse than losing all of the data on just one drive?

Further, why do you assume that I need your help to understand my own position?

Is it more LOGIC that leads you to these assumptions? Maybe it stands for "Loose, Orthoginal, Generalized and Inductive Conclusions".

Expand on it? It's that the unconstrained RAID0 bashing which is so vogue here is downright silly.

Assertions like there's "no reason" to run RAID0 are simply false, storage drive or not. It can make sense for applications where the storage drive's data is backed-up or recreatable, and data from that drive needs to be accessed in a manner that plays to RAID0's strengths.

Why not use RAID0 for long-term, high-speed storage, if a backup is available?

Why do you think it's accepetable to use RAID0 for a video editing station? If it's twice as likely that all the data is lost, then it's twice as likely you'll come back to the machine after finishing a phone call and find that your morning's work is gone.

Losing a whole logical volume to RAID0 failing isn't any worse than losing a whole logical volume to a single drive failing. Data is lost; if it can't be recreated or restored, then it's bad news either way. RAID0_MAKES_ME_SAD has no backup. Either he's in here asking for help because RAID 0 died, or he's in here asking for help because his boot drive died, or he's in here asking for help because his "storage drive" died. Either way, it's data loss, and downtime. He's not in The World of RAID0; he's in The World of He Wishes He Had a Backup.

Does RAID0 speed everything up? Nope, absolutely not. But just like any other technology-based solution, applying it where it's appropriate delivers clear wins. And just like any other technology solution, people often misapply it and overestimate its benefits. (And just like any other technology, I guess I shouldn't be surprised when I find people who eschew it for all purposes because they've overestimated its defecits.)
 
mikeblas said:
Why do you assume that losing all of the data is worse than losing all of the data on just one drive?
There's more of it. More data lost = more loss. For example, assuming he's got childhood photos on a raid 0 array, losing one drive would lose every picture; if the pictures are distributed over seperate disks he loses an nth of them.
mikeblas said:
Why not use RAID0 for long-term, high-speed storage, if a backup is available?
The cost and/or time spent restoring from backup may be unacceptable. Depending on the software, backups may silently fail and leave you with no backup.

Note that I think raid 0 is perfectly acceptable for some applications. But
mikeblas said:
He's not in The World of RAID0; he's in The World of He Wishes He Had a Backup.
Agreed. Un-striping the OP's drives before the failure would leave him with data loss now anyways. This post isn't about raid 0, it's about backup. If his controller had barfed and deleted data without a disk dropping out, it might be construed as a raid 0 problem, but this is a lack of backup pure and simple.

Edit: here's that picture someone else tried to hotlink:


 
unhappy_mage said:
There's more of it. More data lost = more loss. For example, assuming he's got childhood photos on a raid 0 array, losing one drive would lose every picture; if the pictures are distributed over seperate disks he loses an nth of them.
Maybe there is, and maybe there isn't. We don't know that the drive that failed in the JBOD setup had any data on it. Or that it didn't have the more important data, or the more precious pictures, or the better songs.

unhappy_mage said:
The cost and/or time spent restoring from backup may be unacceptable.
Then a single drive solution is inadequate as well.
 
I never said that there was no application for raid0.

If you actually read my posts, you would see that I in fact gave a concrete example of a time when having a raid0 array is perfectly logical. I mentioned nonlinear video editing. As it involves large sequential reads and writes raid0 is perfect for a scratch drive for while you are working. As soon as you are done, you need to backup all of the work you have done onto some kind of redundant medium, but while you are working striped drives are the thing to have.

To include my posts as part of the "rampant raid0 bashing" on this forum is simple proof that you either didn't read my posts at all or lack reading comprehension skills.
 
mikeblas said:
Who said you did?

mikeblas said:
It's that the unconstrained RAID0 bashing which is so vogue here is downright silly.

Assertions like there's "no reason" to run RAID0 are simply false, storage drive or not.

You say things like that while quoting one of my posts surely makes it sound like that is what you are saying.

Or do you just take any chance you can to post an extended diatribe about something completely unrelated to what is going on in the thread?
 
backups may silently fail and leave you with no backup.

I will say this... don't trust CDroms or DVDroms with your data either... they go bad faster then you think.

I usually keep an external volume of the same size as my data drive... and I use that as backup. I turn it on when I need to and turn it off when not using. Tapes or dvds don't hold enough anymore to be useful.
 
If (when???) holographic storage ever goes mainstream, it will be a great backup strategy. Relatively cheap cartridges, the read/write speed isn't so great but it doesn't need to be for backup. No moving parts, so they should be at least as reliable as optical media (when handled carefully) with 300gigs per cartridge.
 
TMan1876 said:
You say things like that while quoting one of my posts surely makes it sound like that is what you are saying.

Here's what you actually said:

TMan1876 said:
There is no reason to run 3x250gb harddrives in raid0 as your *storage* drive.

which sounds a lot like someone asserting there's no reason to run RAID0 for their storage drive, which is one of the two scenarios captured by the sentence that I wrote. Note that I didn't credit you with the unlimited assertion you've recollected.

But, look; you've again defended your LOGIC with condescending ad homenim attacks, and that's not productive for anyone. You're sure you're right and those who disagree can't comprehend what they read. That's obviously very empowering for you, so I'll get out of your way. Go with it!
 
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