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RAID questions

B

braidman

Gawd
Joined
Mar 6, 2003
Messages
862
My cousin has an External Western Digital Striped RAID disk. The controller has died, the drives still work fine. I've been trying to help him figure out if they are recoverable.

I have no experience with RAID's, no one's ever given me identical drives and I dont have the scratch to buy them. Alot of questions have arisen from my searches...

1. The Data is stored on the drive, but is there also metadata about the partitions/striping stored on the drive or was that stored on the controller and lost forever?
See this article..
http://spench.net/drupal/resources/raid0
Or is the data needed stored on the now dead controller?

2. Is there some format or standard for this metadata? Is every controller its own animal with no patterns or commonality between them? Or, can the disks be plugged into a motherboard with a raid controller or an add on card and the card detect what the sector size and position is and start reading the data?

Btw, his drive is a WD MyBook Pro Edition II external. The drives are WD5000KS SATA...

Thanks for any input. :)
 
First of all, was this configured as RAID0 or RAID1?

RAID1: might be able to just recover using a USB to SATA adapter.

RAID0: ouch. See below:

Assuming the drives are okay, you have a few options available to you:

1) buy another WD MyBook Pro Edition II external, and swap the disks, praying that they`ll transfer happily; if it works, probably the easiest and quickest solution
2) use something like R-Studio to re-construct your RAID. You`ll still need somewhere to save the recovered files, so you may need a new USB drive anyway. I`ve had good success with this software myself (rebuilt data from a laice 4TB NAS).
3) send the disks off for professional recovery ($$)

Either way, I`d suggest doing a `dd` dump of the disks just in case (arbitrary backup). Ghost or Acronis will work just fine as well. Do the backup before you start trying to restore!

How important is the data?
 
All the RAID info is stored on the drives but is propritary to the controller and I have no idea what controller your unit uses.

Follow Tormentum's advice and good luck!
 
Whilest the controller is proprietary, most controllers still do the same thing, stripe data based on a block size. I'd be surprised if the disks themselves had any meta data written to them. Typically with these basic RAID controllers, the RAID configuration is stored on the controller them selves. The converse is true of enterprise class arrays (eg: LSI etc), there is metadata stored on disk. This is due to the higher complexity of the arrays and the types of RAID they can perform. With RAID 0 and 1 (which is used by the WD device), there are only a limited number of configurations, hence I don't believe there would be need for metadata. Note that I have not been able to find a reference on google confirming this (despite searching for the last 20 mins).

What the R-Studio software (and other raid recovery software) does is read the disks in raw format and assist you in discovering the correct block size. I like R-Studio purley because it tries to autodetect the above block size, and then shows you the partitions, file systems and files it has found.

If you have some spare disk space, you can perform a dd copy of the physical drives and then mount the raw dd files with R-Studio instead of having to mess around with the disks themselves. This is preferable as by doing this, you limit the risk of damaging any of the data on the physical drives.
 
Thanks for the excellent answers guys.

I thought that most controllers did the same thing, the fact that they dont store any metadata and there isnt a standard for this data, is another one of those instances where the bullheadedness of the companies is just unbelievable.

I talked to my cousin tonight and it ends up he had a backup of the data somewhere else. (shwew thank goodness).
It was RAID 0 (useless)
He is a video guy, so it was probably video clips, very important for his business.
He says he has 10TB sitting on his desk in external drives, with multiple failed controllers.

My new question is, what's a Good solution for him? Needs to be portable rugged and preferably fast (and multi-terabyte(no ssd's)). Not costing $1000 would be good too.

He said he doesnt have scratch to really solve the problem now, but at some point he hopes to.
Btw, doesn't have to be RAID.
 
the fact that they dont store any metadata
Click to expand...
I think they do but it's a moot point.

My new question is, what's a Good solution for him? Needs to be portable rugged and preferably fast (and multi-terabyte(no ssd's)).
Click to expand...
First off, don't buy that premade junk!

An external drive is nothing more than an internal 2.5" or 3.5" drive in an external case.

Buy any brand of HD and install it into a decent external case.

You'll have the longer warranty of the HD (up to 5 yrs) and be able to remove them from the case for troubleshooting.

You'll have to get more specifics from him (USB powered 2.5" or 110v powered 3.5" or whatever) before anyone can provide specific recommendations.
 
Well,
Most Multi-Terabyte hard drives are still 3.5 inch drives, he's a video guy, though he could use windows like most video guys he loves his macs, and he is using a fully HD workflow now so he needs to transfer faster than normal USB so USB 3.0 or Firewire 800 or something faster would be ideal. Although he needs it to be portable and rugged, I think in most cases he has 120v/AC available so it doesnt have to be petite or power efficient.

He said they started using this more recently...
I probably would have recommended that or maybe this...

Of course...the second one is getting into some fairly serious scratch...

But something of that nature..
Are there any that use a fibre connection? I guess it wouldnt matter since the disk cant read that quickly...
 
Uh Oh, I'm Mac ignorant......big time!

And I use eSATA for my external drives.

I hope someone else can jump in and help ya.
 
If he is using a newer mac with thunderbolt, tell him to save up and get a thunderbolt RAID device. LACIE, and Promise each make a couple, and they aren't exactly cheap
 
braidman said:
...
He said they started using this more recently...
I probably would have recommended that or maybe this...

Of course...the second one is getting into some fairly serious scratch...
Click to expand...
That second one lacks USB 3.0. (Seriously, isn't Firewire [even 800] falling behind the times? Average transfer rate of [soon-to-be] new drives is 120-130M/sec+; and then next year?) USB 3.0 can handle 300+ M/sec; FW800 does what? 50-80?? [USB 3.0 laughs at 2.0, like 2.0 laughed at 1.1:). Where is FW8K?]

While eSATA might be his preferred interface (using it on his own Mac), having USB 3.0 as an alternate may prove very valuable in unplanned scenarios. Or, if he doesn't yet have eSATA connectivity, USB 3.0 might just be a better primary choice.

Nice that you're concerned about his expenditures, but it's for his business, so hopefully he knows best.

--UhClem
 
While eSATA might be his preferred interface
Click to expand...
You sure you're not getting confused? I said my favorite interface was eSATA.

I didn't even know Macs had eSATA because Firewire was the Mac thing.

I told ya I'm a Mac-Ignoramus! LOL!
 
Old Hippie said:
You sure you're not getting confused? I said my favorite interface was eSATA.

I didn't even know Macs had eSATA because Firewire was the Mac thing.

I told ya I'm a Mac-Ignoramus! LOL!
Click to expand...
:)Not confused at all! This was an (implicit, and unintended) ambuguity.

My "he/his" was in reference to OP's brother. Twas OP's post I quoted (though the explicit brother reference was ... excised ...)

Maybe I should have been more careful to foresee the potential for this "humorous calamity" by carefully parsing/examining the posts intervening mine and the one I was replying to, but ...
"No harm, no foul." Fair enough?

Hey, this little belch is nothing compared to some of the snafu's that arose, pre-web, on Usenet, from cascading asynchronicities:); circa 1980s. [Hey, maybe I'm still living in the past, when the accepted maxim was "If I didn't quote it, don't assume I've seen it."]

O.H., if this doesn't make sense, you're not that "Old":).

--UhClem "Base 8 arithmetic is easy! (if you're missing two fingers)" -T.L.
 
@OP

If your cousin is looking for a solution aimed at video production, he should perhaps look at ProAVIO. Their EB8sx might be precisely what he's looking for.
 
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