More RAID 5 sets are finished off by the rescue attempt than by the disk that failed. One more rebuild loaded onto worn members, one repair option writing over the records, and a straightforward job becomes a hard one. RAID 5 data recovery here removes that risk: every member imaged first, the array solved in software, and not one write landing on a disk you own.
Nothing about a RAID quote is guessed. Free diagnostic, then one written number — £500 + VAT upward on member count, and logical rebuilds keep no fix, no fee.
Losing one disk is the one event a RAID 5 was designed to absorb. What keeps the RAID data recovery bench busy is what people do in the hours afterwards, and every one of these six arrives from North-East server rooms.
The spare goes in. The controller then grinds through every surviving disk for hour after hour until one of the tired ones lets go. Degraded at breakfast, dead by tea. No other RAID failure arrives here as often.
Backplanes, host adapters and controllers give out long before the disks they manage. The members are healthy, the volume simply never appears, and it will not until layout and parity are read off the platters.
A disk that dropped out two weeks ago is a snapshot of two weeks ago. Push it back online and the controller starts folding that old picture into current stripes, wrecking parity across the whole set.
Parity hides a bad sector on one disk without complaint. Two disks with bad sectors at the same address leave a hole nothing bridges, so weak regions on every member are imaged around before a stripe goes back together.
Menu options reading re-create, initialise or repair will overwrite the records describing where your data lives, and the warning they give is not worth reading. If one has already been used, that is the moment to stop.
Adding a disk or changing RAID level takes hours of continuous work. A power cut, a crash or an impatient reboot leaves the set marooned between two layouts and readable as neither.
Your disks never go back into a live array in this lab. Every member goes onto a hardware imager, and anything carrying a physical fault visits the clean bench beforehand. Every decision after that is taken against the images: disk order, stripe size, rotation, the direction parity runs. The volume is assembled virtually on top of them and the files are extracted from that assembly. Your own disks stay on a shelf and are not touched again. They are the fallback nobody expects to need.
Fitting a spare and letting the controller try again feels like doing something useful. Where a set has already spent its redundancy, that is about the most dangerous thing available. A rebuild loads the tiredest disks hardest, at precisely the moment they can least stand it. One more casualty and a routine job becomes a slow, delicate one. A stalled rebuild, or a log filling with read errors, means power off and step back. Nothing about a stationary array gets worse.
A fair share of this work is the whole trading history of a small business. PowerEdge and ProLiant boxes from Dell and HP, self-built towers, Synology, QNAP and Netgear units, sent down from Aberdeen, Peterhead, Elgin, Inverurie and Montrose. Engineering consultancies and offshore contractors make up a fair part of the diary. Disks come to the Edinburgh lab, two and a half hours down the A90 or overnight by tracked post, and a set stopping a business is moved up the bench queue. The wider service sits on RAID recovery and NAS recovery, with money on the data recovery cost page.
Cut the power, box every member, and the set gets solved in software. The written number reaches you first.
Nearly everything on this bench came by tracked, insured post. It is the safest way to shift a failing drive, and a parcel handed in at a North-East post office is usually here the next working day.
Still bolted into a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR box? Get the hard drive or SSD out first. The bare drive travels on its own. Stripping machines down is not a job this lab takes on. Flash soldered to a motherboard, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a couple of very thin laptops, is our one flat no: if it will not unbolt, it cannot be worked on.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it for the attention of Edinburgh Data Recovery. From Aberdeen that is roughly 130 miles and two and a half hours down the A90, or next working day by tracked post if you would rather not make the run. You get a call the moment it is booked onto the bench.
Not sure what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or work through the free online diagnostic.