A pair that failed together, a resync that ran the wrong way, a two-bay box that died around healthy disks — none of it necessarily means lost data. Each member is imaged on its own and your files rebuilt from whichever copy proves stronger.
No RAID case is quoted blind. Free diagnostic first, then one written figure — from £500 + VAT by member count, with logical rebuilds covered by no fix, no fee.
A mirror promises to survive one dead disk. Everything else on this list sails straight past that promise — and lands here.
Mirror members are bought in the same order, powered on the same day and worn by the same workload. Whatever finishes the first disk tends to be lining up the second, sometimes only days behind.
In two-bay NAS units and mirrored externals it is usually the bridge board or controller that dies first. Two healthy disks sit locked inside a dead enclosure until each is read directly.
Swap the wrong member, or trust the unit's guess, and the blank or stale disk gets copied over the good one — the mirror diligently destroying the very files it existed to keep.
A pair that has limped along degraded — once on each member, at different times — ends up holding two different histories. Merged carelessly they wreck each other; imaged separately, both can contribute.
Deletion, corruption, a bad update, ransomware — the mirror's whole job is copying writes, so it copies the damage to both members in the same moment.
Failed NAS firmware or an operating-system fault can seal off a perfectly sound pair until both disks are imaged and the volume rebuilt elsewhere.
From the first minute the pair is treated as two separate cases. Each member is read out on dedicated imaging hardware — clean-room work first for any disk that has physically failed — and the two images are then compared to decide which carries the fuller, fresher copy of your data. The volume is then rebuilt on top of whichever image proves stronger, the weaker one filling gaps where it can, and nothing is ever written back to either original.
RAID 1 makes a single, narrow promise: one drive can die and the volume lives. Every other failure walks through it — a deletion or a corrupting update is copied to both members in the same heartbeat, ransomware locks the pair in a single pass, and a dead enclosure removes the two together. A broken mirror is therefore a genuine recovery case, and the lesson underneath it is that a real backup lives on separate media, somewhere else.
The pairs on our bench mostly come out of Netgear, QNAP and Synology two-bay boxes and small office servers, sent in from Swindon, Devizes, Highworth and Malmesbury. Both disks travel together to our Oxford location — an easy run up the A420, or next-day tracked post. The broader service sits under RAID recovery and NAS recovery, with figures on the data recovery cost page.
We'll image the pair and rebuild from the stronger copy — 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.
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Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.