Back in the bad old days (mid 2000s), before SSDs and 8TB hard drives, PC builders faced a difficult decision. Everyone wanted more storage space, but large disks were expensive. Fortunately for the manufacturers, most PCs could invisibly combine two smaller & cheaper disks into a larger one, using RAID 0 (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). The technology had previously been confined to data centres where servers used RAIDs for various performance & security benefits. Unfortunately for most customers, they had no idea this was happening in their PC until things stopped working. Either the customer, or a technician would open the PC to find two smaller disks where they expected to see a single larger one.
If you were lucky, the tech would call in a specialist 👋 and your data would be recovered safely. If you were less lucky, there are lots of ways to wreck this setup.
The best way to trash a RAID 0 is by not realising that’s what you’re looking at in the first place. It’s easy to mistake the disks as two independent disks. We’ve seen far too many cases where one of the disks was erased or reinstalled with Windows as an attempt to resurrect the PC. At best, this will make the recovery difficult. At worst, it can make recovery impossible.
Without trying to sound like a broken record, this is another example of my catchphrase – Most damage to data happens AFTER the original failure.
Leave a Reply