RAID 0 HDDs Bad Sectors

[eugene0420]

Hi,
This is what happened:

Two Seagate HDDs, 1TB each, was in a NAS in RAID 0.
After copying some big files to the NAS, it suddenly refused to display files.
The warning lights started flashing, indicating critical level of "Reallocated Sectors Count".

Tried to fix the drives, data recovery software doesn't work.
Cannot mirror and reconstruct RAID because I have no drive bigger than 1TB.
Don't want to pay Seagate thousands of dollars to recover the data,
and local computer stores even failed to diagnose the problem 🙁

That's pretty much what happened, can someone please give advice or solution to rescue my data?

Thanks

Eugene

 

[americanbrian]

Danger of RAID 0. Not sure if your data can be recovered, depends on precisely what happened on the broken drive.

 

[McHenryB]

You had data that you didn't want to lose on a RAID 0 array with no backups? Not a lot you can do now, but a recovery company might be able to help if the data is important enough. But, surely, it can't be very important data if you didn't think a backup was necessary.

 

[USAFRet]

This is why you never use a RAID 0 without a viable backup.

If you and the local stores have tried several things, and it hasn't worked, likely whatever was on there is gone.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there eugene0420.
The first rule of RAID 0 is to never keep any important data on it which is not backed up, but I guess unfortunately you've learned this the hard way. There are a lot of RAID 0 recovery/reconstruction programs out there, but I doubt any of them will do a great job, but you could still try a few. Unfortunately your best bet would be a professional solution such as a data recovery company. 🙁

edit: looks like other people from the community have already mentioned what I said, before I posted my answer

Good luck! I hope you're able to recover your files.
Boogieman_WD

 

[eugene0420]

This is why you never use a RAID 0 without a viable backup.

If you and the local stores have tried several things, and it hasn't worked, likely whatever was on there is gone.

Well, I didn't know what was a RAID back when I set up the NAS.....

And the local store told me, "the drive got a broken head, so pay us $$$ to open the drive". But then I can read from the drive, so..... After all it's just bad sectors.

So, any solutions?

 

[USAFRet]

This is why you never use a RAID 0 without a viable backup.

If you and the local stores have tried several things, and it hasn't worked, likely whatever was on there is gone.

Well, I didn't know what was a RAID back when I set up the NAS.....

And the local store told me, "the drive got a broken head, so pay us $$$ to open the drive". But then I can read from the drive, so..... After all it's just bad sectors.

So, any solutions?

That is unlikely to retrieve the data in the RAID array.

RAID 0 - data is striped across the 2 drives. There is no way to predict what, specifically, is on each.

Solution? If it is at all readable...go buy a large enough drive to hold it, and copy the data over. You almost certainly cannot fix it in place.
If it's not currently readable, then you are probably out of luck.

 

[eugene0420]

So now I will need to get a 2TB drive, somehow clone the drives over, and try to recover the data.
That's not totally bad, now I have an excuse to get a 2TB drive for my next PC build...

The drives are not directly readable when tried separately, though accessible, mostly because they were striped across two drives.

I've found some "RAID reconstruct" software online, maybe I can try that?

 

[McHenryB]

I guess you can try the software, but I wouldn't rate your chances highly. To quote the publisher of one such program:

Since RAID 0 arrays are non-redundant, then if one of the member disks fails, then data that was on the failed disk is lost forever. Having data from the rest of the member disks you can try to recover files. However, only the files which are smaller than (N-1)*(block size) can be recovered. Even files smaller than that limit can be unrecoverable if the part of the file happens to be on a failed disk.

RAID-0 really is an all-or-nothing setup. Whoever sold you a computer set up in this way without telling you the importance of regular, tested backups should be banned from ever selling another computer.