A Dublin-based digital marketing agency were using a G-Tech NAS to store their Photoshop and Final Cut Pro files. There was over 2 years worth of design work backed-up onto the device. Last Monday morning, the folder shares for the device were not accessible from any of their computers. Thinking that it was only a glitch, they rebooted the device. Still no dice. They called their tech support company. Their technician suspected that their RAID array had failed. Not enamoured with the prospect of having to re-do years of graphic design work. Their tech support company recommended Drive Rescue.
Our technicians examined their NAS. RAID 0 was being used. The drives were formatted in HFS+ (which is the default file system for Apple). We performed diagnostics the drives (Hitachi Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB X 2). One drive (drive 0) passed the diagnostic test with flying colours. However, it’s counterpart (drive 1) had extensive bad sectors. We imaged both drives using a hardware imager designed for data recovery. Then, using images of drive 0 and drive 1, our technicians used a hex editor to find exact parameters of the G-Tech’s RAID array. This included determining the stripe size, the disk offset and parity. Once these had been calculated, it was now possible to start the rebuild of the array. This took nearly 13 hours to complete. All our work was not in vain however – all of the client’s data was successfully recovered for the very satisfied client.