The most dangerous moment in a RAID’s life isn’t the disk failure — it’s the rebuild that follows. Arrays limp for months on a degraded leg, then die properly when a second disk quits mid-rebuild at 60-something percent. The bench’s first rule exists for exactly that story: every member disk is imaged before any array logic runs.
$ edr connecting…
RAID’s redundancy creates RAID’s trap. A RAID 5 survives one lost disk, so the loss gets tolerated — and a degraded array works its survivors harder, which is precisely when disk two (often the same age, batch and wear as disk one) gives up: classically, mid-rebuild. RAID 0 has no redundancy at all — one disk down is everything down, and two-disk ‘performance’ externals quietly ship this way. RAID 1 and 10 mirror, which protects against disk death but faithfully mirrors every deletion and corruption too. And behind all of them sits controller metadata — the map of stripe order, block size and disk sequence that a failed controller or a panicked ‘initialize’ click can destroy while the data itself sits intact.
Every disk from your array is cloned individually before reconstruction begins — so whatever happens next, the originals’ state is preserved forever. The array is then rebuilt virtually from the images: stripe order and parity rotation worked out from the data itself when metadata is gone, the failed member reconstructed from parity mathematics, and the file system validated before a single file is called recovered. What we ask of you is one thing: label the disks with their bay order (1, 2, 3…) as you remove them, and never let anyone ‘force online’ or re-initialize the array to ‘see if it comes back’. It doesn’t come back. It gets overwritten.
No — but stop now. A rebuild that dies partway means a second disk is failing; retrying works that disk harder. Recovery images all members including the sick one, reconstructs the array virtually from the copies, and rebuilds the missing stripe from parity. This exact scenario is bread and butter here.
Usually not — send labelled disks only. Stripe order, block size and parity rotation can be recovered from the disks' own data patterns when the controller or its metadata is gone. If a hardware controller is easily included, it can help; it's rarely essential.
Depends what wrote where, and honesty requires: it can be bad. Initialization typically rewrites array metadata and sometimes more. Power everything down now, note exactly what was clicked, and let the diagnostic map what survived — partial recovery is common even after wrong turns.
A free diagnostic first, always — then a fixed written quote before any work begins. No surprises on the invoice, because there's no invoice until you've approved the number.
A representative selection of related work from the bench.
Getting a device onto this bench only takes two moves, and the clock on your free look starts the moment it lands.
Strip out cables, caddies and power bricks — none of it helps — wrap the device so it can't shift in transit, and either post it insured to 83 Princes Street, Edinburgh EH2 2ER or bring it in yourself. Tuck a note of what happened in with it, and enclose the shipping form if you've printed one.
Arrival gets confirmed, the diagnostic runs at no cost to you, and the call that follows names the fault and states a fixed price. The bench stays idle on your device until you say go.
Free diagnostic, a written quote before anything else, and every member imaged before any rebuild is attempted.