RAID 0 Possible Recovery

[LucaSeem2000]

Hi There,

Before you say that I can't recover one of my RAID 0s, i would like to tell you what happened. I accidentally formatted one of my RAID 0 hard drives. This was not a low-level format, because it took less than a second, therefore I know that the information is there somewhere. Using my other HDD, can I possibly "bring forward" my lost data in the same folders etc?

Thanks,

LucaSeem2000

 

[unoriginal1]

First you have to understand what Raid 0 is. I'm assuming you do.. But i'm going to give a brief description anyways. Raid 0 is where data is spread across 2 or more disks evenly. So basically 50% of the data is on disk 1 and 50% of the data is on disk 2. Therefore, disk 1 will not work with out disk 2 and vice versa.

By reformatting you are correct.. the data is still there. But.. the real question.. Is all of the data there? And enough of it to have disk 1 properly work with disk 2 again? Answer? Probably not...

Raid 0 is for speed. Not redundancy. It doubles failure rates because well simply your taking the chance of if 1 of 2 drives fail that you have total data loss.

Did you have a back up? I hope so.. Because this is most likely unless your very lucky. Your only source of getting back your data.

Best of luck thou!

 

[Pinhedd]

Hi There,

Before you say that I can't recover one of my RAID 0s, i would like to tell you what happened. I accidentally formatted one of my RAID 0 hard drives. This was not a low-level format, because it took less than a second, therefore I know that the information is there somewhere. Using my other HDD, can I possibly "bring forward" my lost data in the same folders etc?

Thanks,

LucaSeem2000

When you perform a quick format it simply initializes the core elements of the filesystem and treats all unallocated space as uninitialized.

RAID-0 is known as "striping" in that the logical addresses are spread across each hard drive in blocks. If 64KiB (65,536 bytes) stripes are used, the first 128 512 byte sectors will be on disk 0, followed by the next 128 512 byte sectors on disk 1. Since the filesystem exists on the logically addressed volume just as files do, you destroyed half of your file system by formatting one of the two disks.

Even if the old data was never erased, it is no longer possible to determine what sectors were used to store what files. When a file in the file system is deleted, it is not erased, it is simply marked as being available for overwriting. It will be recoverable until the space is either overwritten, or in the case of an SSD, freed up through garbage collection. When the filesystem itself is destroyed, all data loses any semblance of order and becomes effectively meaningless.

TL;DR = It's gone.

 

[unoriginal1]

Hi There,

Before you say that I can't recover one of my RAID 0s, i would like to tell you what happened. I accidentally formatted one of my RAID 0 hard drives. This was not a low-level format, because it took less than a second, therefore I know that the information is there somewhere. Using my other HDD, can I possibly "bring forward" my lost data in the same folders etc?

Thanks,

LucaSeem2000

When the filesystem itself is destroyed, all data loses any semblance of order and becomes effectively meaningless.

TL;DR = It's gone.

This was the explanation I was waiting for. I wasn't certain if recovery programs would be able to make sense of the data or not (hence why I didn't suggest it) very thorough explanation Pinhedd.

 

[LucaSeem2000]

Eeek! You guys are fast!

I suppose I won't be able to recover the drive, but I do have a backup. I will definitely not recommend RAID 0 to anyone and I might invest in a PCIe SSD.

Thanks, LucaSeem2000

 

[Pinhedd]

Eeek! You guys are fast!

I suppose I won't be able to recover the drive, but I do have a backup. I will definitely not recommend RAID 0 to anyone and I might invest in a PCIe SSD.

Thanks, LucaSeem2000

RAID-0 is an extremely viable solution and can have a very positive impact on performance. It just doubles the chance of data loss through hard drive failure.

 

[S Haran]

I would agree that a 100% recovery is not possible. But the extent of the damage is to the sectors overwritten when you did the quick format. Which should be relatively small. So I expect if you were to reassemble the RAID-0 and then use data recovery software against the RAID volume you would be able to recover a large portion of your data. But probably not worth the hassle if you have a backup.