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12 Years, 300GB Drives, 99.23% Recovery - A RAID 6 Success Story

A catastrophic power outage led to complete failure of multiple 300GB SAS drives in a 12-year-old RAID 6 system, resulting in severe platter damage, yet through meticulous recovery techniques, 99.23% of critical virtual machine data was successfully restored.

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★★★★★

Superb service from R3 Data Recovery. Having stupidly deleted an external drive of all my files I called and Andy was of invaluable help. He went through different options and advised me on the one that would probably be the best for the issue I had. 24 hours later I have all of my data back where it should be. Cannot recommend highly enough.

Abi


300GB SAS HDD - cover removed showing internal platter with visible scoring damage

Can a 12-year-old RAID 6 be recovered when all 300GB 10k SAS drives have crashed as a result of power outages?

What do 12-year-old 300GB 10k SAS HDDs look like after a head crash?

Not the way they should!

Instead of a shiny, smooth, mirrored finish, it can look like the grooves of a vinyl record have been scored into the protective layer and through to the recording layer, with debris from the heads and platters spread around all the internal surfaces of the drive.

All have varying levels of platter damage, resulting in unreadable sectors in different areas of each disk needed to rebuild the RAID 5.

Despite the catastrophic levels of damage, enough of each disk has been read to rebuild the RAID 5, but it cannot be perfect despite parity/redundancy.

The single RAID 5 volume hosts a number of VMs.

One of the VMs is all but perfect - the O/S.

The second VM has the critical SharedDataFolder containing the files needed by the client.

The VM file itself, its file system, and individual files are affected by the unreadable sectors drilled down into individual files.

As a percentage of the data in numbers and size, how much of the data was unrecovered?

Linkedin poll:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andy-butler-r3-data-recovery_what-do-12-year-old-300gb-10k-sas-hdd-look-activity-7287211252139884544-Sznv?


Click to expand for the actual answer! The answer in this case recovered by Team R3 was 0.77% - 650MB across 100 files.