More RAID 5 sets are lost in the attempt to save them than in the original fault: one more rebuild loaded onto worn disks, one repair option scribbling over the records. RAID 5 data recovery here removes that gamble — every member copied before anything else happens, the array worked out in software, and not a single write landing on a disk you own.
No RAID quote is guesswork. Free diagnostic first, then one written figure — from £500 + VAT by member count, logical rebuilds under no fix, no fee.
Losing one disk is the single event a RAID 5 was designed to shrug off. What fills the RAID data recovery service diary is whatever happens in the hours afterwards, and Norfolk server rooms send us all six of these.
A replacement goes in, the controller then reads every remaining disk from end to end for hours, and one of the tired ones stops. An array that was merely degraded at breakfast is dead by tea, and nothing else on this bench comes close for frequency.
Backplanes, host adapters and controllers tend to fail long before the disks they mind. Nothing is wrong with the members at all, yet the volume never appears — not until the layout and parity are read straight off the platters.
A disk that dropped out a fortnight ago is a photograph of a fortnight ago. Bring it back online and the controller starts mixing that stale picture into current stripes, spoiling parity across the whole array as it goes.
Parity quietly covers a duff sector on one disk. Duff sectors at matching addresses on two disks leave a gap nothing can bridge, so every weak region on every member is imaged around before a stripe is put back together.
Options labelled re-create, initialise and repair can overwrite the very records that describe where your data lives, with no warning worth the name. If one has already been pressed, that is where the pressing stops.
Adding a disk, or moving between RAID levels, takes hours of solid work. Interrupt it — power cut, crash, someone losing patience — and the set is left stranded between two layouts and readable as neither.
No disk you own is ever put back into a running array here. Everything begins with each disk going onto a hardware imager, and any member with a physical fault visits the clean bench before that happens. From then on the whole job is worked against the copies: disk order, stripe size, rotation and the direction parity travels are all deduced from them, the volume is assembled virtually on top, and your files are pulled off that virtual assembly. The real disks stay on a shelf, untouched, as the fallback nobody expects to need.
Fitting a spare and letting the box have another go feels like taking charge of the situation. On a set that has already used up its redundancy it is about the riskiest thing anyone can do: a fresh rebuild leans hardest on the weakest disks at the worst possible moment, and one more casualty turns a routine RAID data recovery into a slow and delicate one. A rebuild that has stalled, or is filling the log with errors, is the signal to cut the power and walk away. Nothing about the array will get worse for sitting still.
Much of the RAID data recovery that lands here is the entire working life of a small business: Dell PowerEdge and HP ProLiant boxes, the occasional tower somebody built themselves, and Synology, QNAP or Netgear units, arriving from Norwich, Thetford, Dereham, Attleborough and King's Lynn. The disks travel to our Cambridge location, an hour and twenty on the A11 or one working day by tracked post, and where a firm is sitting idle the set can be brought forward on the bench. RAID recovery and NAS recovery cover the rest of it, and the money is set out on the data recovery cost page.
Power off, box every member, and the set is put back together in software. A written quote comes first.
Most of what reaches this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel posted in Norfolk is usually on the bench the next working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? The hard drive or SSD needs to come out first, and only the bare drive travels — taking drives out of machines is not something we do here. Storage soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, one or two very thin laptops) is the single thing beyond us: if it will not come out, it cannot come in.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. From Norwich it is about an hour and twenty down the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32 — or next working day by tracked post. You hear from us as soon as it is booked onto the bench.
Unsure what to put in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or run the free online diagnostic.