A single dead member silences an entire RAID 0 — yet silenced is not erased. Bring us the complete set and we image every member, solve the stripe's layout and put your files back together entirely in software.
No RAID case is quoted blind. Free diagnostic first, then one written figure — from £500 + VAT by member count, with logical recoveries covered by no fix, no fee.
A RAID 0 scatters every file across all its members and keeps no spare copy — so the volume lives exactly as long as its weakest disk.
Every file exists only as fragments spread over the full set, so a single dead drive silences the lot. Recovery means imaging all members and reassembling the scatter in software.
No parity, no second copy — that was the price of the speed. A stripe cannot regenerate any missing piece of itself, which makes disciplined imaging the only road back.
A dead controller, bridge or enclosure regularly strands a healthy set. The task shifts to working out the stripe's layout so the volume can be rebuilt from images.
Re-creating the array or a firmware glitch can wipe the parameters that define the stripe. Reassembled with wrong numbers, data reads as noise — the true values are recovered from the images themselves.
Because files are interleaved across the set, one patch of weak sectors on one member nicks fragments of hundreds of files. Imaging hardware harvests every readable sector around the damage.
Running format, initialise or 'repair' against a broken stripe destroys the on-disk records recovery leans on. If it has already happened, stop there — power everything off.
With no redundancy in the design, every member carries data nothing else holds. Each disk is read out on dedicated imaging hardware — any physically failed drive passing through the clean room first — and from the images we recover the order of the disks, the size of each block and the starting offset. The stripe is then reassembled in software, the file system rebuilt on top, and your files extracted, with no write ever landing on an original disk.
A striped set cannot mend itself, and a faltering member gives up a little more ground every time the power comes on. The right move is unexciting: shut the system down, resist the initialise and repair tools — they overwrite the very records that describe the stripe — and get the complete set of disks to us exactly as they are.
Video-editing rigs, gaming builds, small servers and performance NAS units — striped volumes reach us from homes and businesses across Swindon, Chippenham, Faringdon and the wider county. Every member travels together to our Oxford location, by courier, tracked post or the A420. For the wider picture see RAID recovery and NAS recovery, and prices sit on the data recovery cost page.
We'll image the set, solve the layout and hand your files back — free diagnostic, then a written figure.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Oxford Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.