Specialist · RAID 0 striped pairs
Striping chops each file into chunks and deals them across the drives in turn. That is the speed two-bay externals and gaming rigs are chasing, and it is bought with zero redundancy — one member down puts a hole in every file bigger than a chunk. Recovering an Exeter pair means imaging both drives, proving the stripe order and size, then rebuilding the set virtually. Where a member is truly past reading, we say straight out what will come back partial.
Talk it over with an engineer
0800 6890668
| What's wrong | What it usually means | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A two-bay external that no longer mounts | Each drive holds alternating chunks — neither is readable on its own | Power off; send the pair as one |
| One member drive dead, or vanished from detection entirely | Any file wider than a single chunk crossed that missing drive | Don’t format anything; the lab decides |
| The set vanished after a motherboard or controller change | Your data hasn’t moved; the new board simply doesn’t know the layout | Geometry is recoverable from images |
| Array deleted or remade in the RAID utility | New metadata went down; the stripes beneath mostly survive | Stop before anything initialises |
| A striped NAS volume now showing RAW | The file system spanning the stripe is hurt; the drives often aren’t | Image both and repair the copy |
| Recovery software was run on each drive separately | Single-disk tools can’t see the interleave, so they output nonsense | Note what was run, then send it all |
Your device is logged under its own case number the day it arrives. An engineer finds the fault, tells you plainly what stands a real chance of coming back, and writes you one fixed quote. Nothing is charged for that look, nothing obliges you, and paid work starts only when you say so.
Both drives are copied in full onto our storage, the struggling one nursed along on a hardware imager — slow passes, bad patches charted. Everything from here on happens to the copies.
Which drive leads, how large each chunk is, where the stripe begins — all three must be proved, and file-system structures give them away: boot records, MFT entries, directory runs. No controller or enclosure is ever needed.
In software the two images are interleaved back into one volume, the file system on top repaired, and the result judged the only way that counts — your files opening properly, not a promising-looking folder tree.
Before any fee falls due you see a full listing of everything recovered and approve it. Your files travel back on brand-new media, return postage on us, and the case stays open until you've confirmed everything opens on your own machine.
The honest limits, before you spend anything: when both members read, a RAID 0 recovery is normally complete — geometry proved, set rebuilt, files checked open. When one member is beyond reading there is no parity to fall back on, so every file larger than a chunk comes back with gaps, while small files sitting whole on the survivor often return intact. The free diagnosis tells you which side of that line yours falls on.
A film editor's two-bay LaCie 2big — striped from new for speed — stopped mounting midway through a project when one member began to fail. Two slow days on the hardware imager coaxed a near-complete copy off the weak drive, stripe order and chunk size were proved from the exFAT structures, and the rebuilt volume handed the project back with only a scatter of damaged clips.
We won't dress it up: RAID 0 keeps no second copy, so whatever cannot be read from the failed member is a hole in the rebuilt set. If a hardware imager can still coax most sectors off the weak drive, the result can run close to complete. If that member truly reads nothing, files small enough to sit inside one chunk on the survivor come back whole, and everything larger returns with gaps. You hear that verdict at the free diagnosis, before you commit to anything.
Both, always. Every file wider than a single chunk spans the pair, so one drive on its own is half a jigsaw with no picture. Send them exactly as they are: no formatting, no test scans, no fresh attempts in the enclosure — and label which bay each came from if you can. A drive that looks stone dead to a PC can often still be imaged on bench equipment, and how much it yields is what sets the quality of the rebuild.
On two healthy members a capable tool can sometimes detect the geometry — but the trap is a wrong guess. Interleave the chunks in the wrong order, or at the wrong size or offset, and you get a volume that looks plausible while every file bigger than a chunk opens as rubbish; people then make it worse trying to repair the mis-built copy. We prove order, chunk size and offset from file-system structures, working on images, where a wrong trial costs nothing.
The striping is the same; the members are not. A dead SSD means a locked controller rather than weak sectors, so there is chip-level work to do before any rebuild can start. TRIM adds a second catch: a live set quietly blanks deleted space, which makes an accidental delete on an SSD pair rarely worth chasing. Stop using the array the moment it misbehaves and send both drives together.
Each power-up of a failing device takes more data with it. Open a case first — the look-over is free whichever way it goes.