12 x SAS Hard Drive 48TB RAID 10 Array
Dell Data Recovery
The customer’s Dell PowerEdge server went down after suffering a serious liquid ingress incident due to a damaged building roof. Consequently, bringing their entire operation to an immediate halt with the potential loss of all their sensitive data.
Rather than risk it, the server team made the right decision in not trying to resurrect this mess themselves. Instead, they called in the professionals…
…..time to wheel out our big guns to deal with this lot.
RAID Data Recovery
Many people think of RAID as their backup, after all, RAID is bombproof right? Wrong!
There is no substitute for actual backups of critical data (both on-site and off-site), as no matter how good – or complicated – the storage media is, they all fail. Unfortunately, this 22 TB RAID 10 Array was suffering from 4 malfunctioning drives, and there’s no chance of the controller handling that level of failure.
Pretty catastrophic on all counts.
The drive assembly consisted of:
- 8 x WD4001FYYG-18SL3W0
- ST40000NM0023
- ST40000NM0295
- HUS726040ALS214
- HDEPF02DAA51
Once we determined the condition of all the drives, the job was on to fix up and stabilise the broken ones, and then begin the time-consuming task of imaging all 12 of them. This is where the situation turned into the gift that just kept on giving 
.
Three of the four malfunctioning drives were a total nightmare. Problem after problem presented themselves, to the point of making the entire job potentially unrecoverable, and several times throughout the recovery we were fighting a losing battle.
However, after a weekend and a few late nights, we pulled this job into line, and after what seemed like an eternity, we finally won the battle and got our customer a 100% recovery. But there was one other task remaining, just the small matter of extracting 8TB of customer data from the image onto a USB external hard drive 
…then job done 
Data Recovered 