When one member dies the whole striped volume falls silent, and silence is not erasure. Send every disc: each is copied, the shape of the stripe is established from those copies instead of guessed at, and the files are reassembled entirely in software.
Nobody guesses at a stripe. The diagnostic is free and one fixed figure follows it — from £500 + VAT counted by disc, with logical reassembly under no fix, no fee.
A striped volume cuts every file into blocks and deals them across the members like cards, holding nothing back for a bad day. It therefore lasts exactly as long as its unluckiest disc, and these are the six ways that runs out.
Every file is spread in fragments across all the discs, so losing any one of them silences the lot at once. The way home is to copy the complete set and reassemble those fragments in software rather than in the box.
Nothing is duplicated and nothing is held in reserve. That missing safety net is exactly what paid for the speed. A stripe cannot regrow any part of itself, which is why patient imaging is the only route back worth trusting.
Enclosures, bridge boards and controllers have failure rates of their own, and they are frequently the first thing in the box to go. The members are read out individually, the layout is established from those reads, and the volume is raised on the copies instead.
Rebuilding the array from a menu, or a firmware stumble partway through, can erase the values recording how the stripe was laid out. Feed a reconstruction the wrong ones and what comes back looks like a disc and opens like rubbish, so the right ones are proved from the images first.
One cluster of weak sectors on one member does not damage one file. Spread through the interleave, it removes a fragment from hundreds of unrelated files at once, which is why imaging hardware that reads around the damage and returns to it repeatedly matters so much here.
Point format, initialise or repair at a collapsed stripe and the structures a reconstruction depends on are flattened underneath it. Where one of those has already run, the useful response is to stop there and cut the power.
Save a document to an ordinary disc and it goes down in one place. Save it to a stripe and it is cut into blocks, and those blocks are dealt out across the members in turn. An average photograph might take four blocks on a two-disc set, alternating between the pair; a video file takes thousands. The consequence is that no single member holds a complete anything, and it is why the instruction to send every disc is not a formality. Half a stripe reassembles into half of every file, and for most modern formats half a file is the same as none of it.
The same arithmetic explains why a small fault does such wide damage. Three hundred failing sectors sitting in one place on one member are not three hundred failing sectors from your point of view. The interleave sprays them across the address space of the rebuilt volume, so what you lose is not a folder but a bite out of a very large number of unrelated files. Imaging hardware that steps around a bad region, returns to it afterwards and reads it in smaller pieces is what keeps that number down.
A stripe is described by three values: which member sat in which position, how big each block is, and how far into each disc the data begins. Change any one of them and the result is wrong. Wrong order shuffles the blocks. Wrong block size puts every boundary in the wrong place. Wrong offset shifts the entire volume sideways by a fixed amount. What makes that dangerous rather than merely irritating is that a wrong reconstruction does not look wrong. It mounts. There is a partition table, folders with the right names, files with plausible sizes and dates. Open one and it is noise, or the middle of somebody else's spreadsheet.
So the three values are worked out from evidence and then confirmed. Structures whose layout is already known are located across the images, their fragments lined up against each other, and the possible descriptions eliminated one by one until a single candidate survives. The last step is opening real documents, photographs and video off the finished reconstruction and watching them work. That is slower than typing numbers into a controller and pressing go, and it is the whole difference between your data and a volume that resembles it.
Editing workstations, gaming builds, small servers and NAS boxes configured for speed: stripes reach this bench from post-production and design firms across the Thames Valley, from software houses on the M4 corridor, from photographers and video editors working out of Windsor, Henley and Ascot, and by courier from every district on the London page. Every member travels together to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH, tracked and insured or on a courier you book yourself. Background sits on RAID recovery and NAS recovery, and the figures are on the data recovery cost page.
Plenty of striped sets never met a dedicated controller at all. Intel RST on a desktop board, Storage Spaces on Windows, mdadm under Linux and the fast mode in a consumer NAS all produce stripes, and every one of them records its own description in its own place — front of the disc, back of the disc, occasionally both. Move those members into a different machine and the new motherboard may read them as unconfigured, offer to set them up, and carry that offer out to the letter.
Two habits follow from that. Write the bay number on each disc as it comes out, because the order is the most useful single thing you can hand over and the first thing to be lost. And do not test members by connecting them to a working computer to see which of them appears: the best outcome is learning something the images would have shown anyway, and the worst is an operating system writing a fresh signature over one that was evidence.
RAID 0 deserves a straight answer on this, because it is the one everyday layout in which real loss is possible. Where a member is damaged past reading, every file crossing its missing blocks is incomplete, and for compressed formats — video, camera raw, current office documents — incomplete usually means unusable. Nothing invents the missing pieces. What does still come back is whatever happened to sit entirely inside the surviving blocks, together with material carved out by file signature, which for photographs and plain text is often a worthwhile haul. Which of those two conversations you are in is settled by the free diagnostic, before any money has changed hands.
Switch the whole set off and leave it off. A striped volume never mends itself, and a disc that has started to fail surrenders a little more every time it is asked to spin up. Avoid anything on a menu called initialise or repair. Collect every member, including one already written off, mark the bays, and pack them so they cannot knock together in the post. Then send the set exactly as you found it, and let the reconstruction happen against copies, where a wrong assumption costs an hour instead of a volume.
Every member copied, the geometry proved rather than guessed, the files put back. Diagnosis is free.
Hardly anything walks into this lab; it arrives in a padded box. Tracked, insured post is the least stressful thing that can happen to storage that has already given up, and a parcel handed over at a Bracknell post office before the last collection is usually in Guildford the following working day.
Is the storage still bolted into a machine — laptop, tower, iMac, MacBook, rack server, a DVR under the till? Free it first and send the bare unit. Stripping hardware is not something this lab does, though it is ten minutes' work for any repair shop on your high street. There is a single case with no way round it: memory chips soldered flat onto the mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon machines and certain ultrabooks are built. Where the storage cannot be unbolted, there is no parcel to make up.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
The name on the parcel wants to be Guildford Data Recovery. Driving it over from Bracknell is roughly forty minutes on the A322 then the A3; posting it costs you a stamp and a day. Either way, a message goes out to you as soon as it is logged onto the system, and two working days later the diagnostic is finished.
Unsure whether something should go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 while the lid is still open, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it tell you.