The quickest way to lose a RAID 5 is trying to save it — another rebuild forced onto tired disks, a repair option that scribbled across the metadata. Our RAID 5 data recovery takes that risk off the table: members captured before anything else, the array solved in software, originals never written to.
No RAID quote is guesswork. Free diagnostic first, then one written figure — from £500 + VAT by member count, logical rebuilds under no fix, no fee.
One dead disk is the exact situation RAID 5 exists to survive. What keeps our RAID 5 data recovery bench busy is everything that happens next — these are the endings North Yorkshire server rooms send us.
In goes the replacement, the rebuild hammers every tired survivor for hours on end, and one of them gives up before the finish line. Degraded turns to dead in an afternoon — comfortably the most common RAID 5 emergency on this bench.
Controllers, HBAs and backplanes fail with less grace than the disks they look after. The members can be perfectly healthy while the volume stays dark — until layout and parity are read back off the disks themselves.
A disk that dropped out weeks back is a snapshot frozen in time. Force it online and the controller weaves old stripes through new ones, poisoning parity across the whole array.
Parity papers over a bad sector on one member; matching bad sectors on two members leave holes nothing can fill. Every fragile region of every disk is imaged around before one stripe is reassembled.
Re-create, initialise and repair options can silently overwrite the metadata that says where your data lives. If somebody's already pressed one, the pressing stops now.
Adding a disk or shifting RAID level is a marathon. Kill it partway — power cut, crash, lost patience — and the set is marooned between two layouts, mountable as neither.
No original member ever spins in a live array again. RAID 5 data recovery here begins with every disk going onto a hardware imager — physically failed members visit the clean bench beforehand — and the whole investigation then runs against those captures. Member order, stripe geometry, rotation and the direction of parity are all deduced from the images; the volume is assembled virtually on top; your files walk off the virtual copy while the real disks sit untouched on the shelf as the final fallback.
Slotting a spare in and letting the controller try again feels productive. On a set that's already spent its redundancy it's the most dangerous act in the server room: another rebuild hammers the tiredest disks at their tiredest moment, and one further casualty turns a routine RAID array recovery into a long and delicate one. A rebuild sat stalled or throwing errors is your cue to cut the power and step away — the array will keep.
Most of the RAID array recovery landing here carries the working life of a small firm — Dell PowerEdge and HP ProLiant servers, the odd home-built tower, plus NAS hardware from Synology, QNAP and Netgear — coming off the A64 from York, Selby, Malton, Thirsk and Northallerton. Members travel to our Leeds location, forty-odd minutes' drive or next working day tracked, and a business-dead array can be moved to the front of the bench. The wider service lives under RAID recovery and NAS recovery, with the figures on the data recovery cost page.
Power off, box up every member, and the set gets rebuilt in software — written quote before any work.
Nearly every job on our bench arrived by tracked, insured post — it's the quickest, safest route in. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send or hand in.
Is the drive still inside a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Take the hard drive or SSD out first and post the bare drive on its own — removing drives from machines isn't a service we offer. Storage that's soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, certain slim laptops) is the one thing we can't work on: if it doesn't come out, it can't come in.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Address the parcel for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery — about 40 minutes from York via the A64 and A1(M), or next working day by tracked post. You'll hear from us the moment it's booked onto the bench.
Not certain what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or run the free online diagnostic.