3 ms·

I've called upon Drive Savers before, when an employer's RAID 5+1 drive lost two disks in one afternoon, the second halfway through a rebuild—and then the propr

by ekidd 9y ago

I've called upon Drive Savers before, when an employer's RAID 5+1 drive lost two disks in one afternoon, the second halfway through a rebuild—and then the proprietary, ancient RAID controller board died before we got somebody onsite. Unfortunately, all the RAID configuration was stored in the dead board and the data layout on disk was proprietary. We ended up paying about $7,000 to Drive Savers and they managed to recover all my employer's data. Drive Savers is definitely a class act. So this offer is a big deal: This isn't some fly-by-night company just trying to market their services. This is a very high-end recovery operation which normally costs a lot of money.

userbinator 9y ago
Unless they have built-in encryption or similar, RAID controllers generally have pretty straightforward on-disk layouts; staring at the disk contents in a hex editor for a little bit will usually reveal the solution. In any case that's still a logical recovery, which is far easier than the presumably physical recovery being offered here.
- ekidd 9y ago
  Well, as noted above, there were two physically failed disks—one which triggered the rebuild, and a second disk which failed with read errors during the rebuild. Then the RAID card died. According to the official policy, the equipment should have been replaced almost five years earlier. So this recovery involved physical recovery of at least one disk to meet the RAID's minimum threshold, then a logical recovery.
luckyt 9y ago
Wow, $7,000 to recover a hard drive is a lot. Does it involve a lot of time-intensive labor? Economically, I'm worried that since this service is free, people will submit drives that have nowhere close to thousands of dollars of value, because it's free so why not? Then if they're overloaded with requests, the company cannot prioritize which drives to save first. Maybe it would be better to offer a heavy discount rather than provide it for free?

by ekidd 9y ago

userbinator 9y ago

Unless they have built-in encryption or similar, RAID controllers generally have pretty straightforward on-disk layouts; staring at the disk contents in a hex editor for a little bit will usually reveal the solution. In any case that's still a logical recovery, which is far easier than the presumably physical recovery being offered here.

ekidd 9y ago
Well, as noted above, there were two physically failed disks—one which triggered the rebuild, and a second disk which failed with read errors during the rebuild. Then the RAID card died. According to the official policy, the equipment should have been replaced almost five years earlier. So this recovery involved physical recovery of at least one disk to meet the RAID's minimum threshold, then a logical recovery.

luckyt 9y ago

Wow, $7,000 to recover a hard drive is a lot. Does it involve a lot of time-intensive labor? Economically, I'm worried that since this service is free, people will submit drives that have nowhere close to thousands of dollars of value, because it's free so why not? Then if they're overloaded with requests, the company cannot prioritize which drives to save first. Maybe it would be better to offer a heavy discount rather than provide it for free?