RAID 0 Data Recovery

RAID 0 stripes data across two or more drives with no redundancy. It is popular in video-editing workstations, gaming PCs and external enclosures such as LaCie 2big and G-RAID units because it is fast and uses all the available capacity.

The downside is that a single failed drive takes the whole array offline, and no files can be read from the surviving disks alone. Recovery means repairing the failed drive and re-assembling the stripe.

Common RAID 0 Failures

• One drive has failed mechanically – clicking, not spinning or not detected
• Enclosure or controller failure in an external RAID 0 unit
• Array broken after drives were moved to a different computer or enclosure
• RAID metadata overwritten by a BIOS reset or re-initialisation
• Accidental deletion or formatting of the striped volume

How We Recover a RAID 0 Array

RAID 0 has no parity, so every member disk is essential. We first repair and image the failed drive – usually a head or firmware fault – then identify the stripe size, disk order and data start offset by analysing file system structures that span the disks. If one disk cannot be fully read, files smaller than one stripe that sit entirely on the healthy disks can still be recovered, and we tell you in advance roughly what proportion of your files that is likely to be.

Before You Do Anything

See RAID & server data recovery for the servers, controllers and NAS systems we support.

Frequently asked questions