Can failed Raid 0 Hard Drive be read?

[sttobin]

I have two WD Velociraptor 150GB Hard Drives with Raid 0 striped. One of the two drives has failed. Is it possible to read the failed drive's data?

 

[CurseTheSky]

There are some options for data recovery, but they're usually either iffy (not guaranteed) or very expensive. If the drive isn't completely dead (for example, clicking and still being detected in BIOS), you could try booting the computer into Windows / Linux from a non-RAID drive or live CD, and seeing if it'll detect the RAID drives. If so, you may be able to recover some data off of them.

Keep in mind that RAID 0 is made only for capacity and performance, not data security. If one of the two drives dies, you lose all of your data.

 

[sttobin]

What I am hoping for is that the drive can't be read and can't be professionally read without both of the RAID 0 hard drives. Thing is that the drive is under a five year warranty with WD but I don't want data to be retrievable.

The Raid 0 drives were backed up just a few hours before the drive went bad (backup Friday evening and dead Saturday morning. Nothing new added before it crashed.

What I want to do is RMA drive to WD but before I do that I need to know whether data on it could be retrieved by anybody.

Also, drive is not clicking.

 

[alyarb]

if the drive won't start, then you can't erase it and you'll have to RMA the way it is. i'm sure WD knows how to deal with confidential data when they refurbish their drives, but if there's something like kiddie porn on the drive, you'll have to just toss it in the trash and get a brand new drive. and turn yourself in.

 

[sttobin]

An interesting reply. Anyway, only personal data is of a Financial nature.

 

[ch33zw1z]

WDC doesn't care what you have for data, they also won't spend the money on a solution to recreate a completely non-redundant RAID 0 disk...if that's even possible...don't forget they'll zero out the drive before they sell it as refurb anyways..

 

[RebateMonger]

A two-disk RAID 0 array will store half the data stream on each of the two disks. That'll be striped on alternating disks as a minimum of 512 Byte-long stripes. While this information would be normally be considered useless for recovering data, it's POSSIBLE to get useful (albeit short and broken) information. Assuming the disk is readable at all.

If that concerns you, then you have to decide if you trust Western Digital with half of your data. WD certainly has procedures that it believes adequate to avoid data being leaked outside their plant. If you don't trust them, then you have no choice but to destroy the drive. A sledge hammer should be adequate.

 

[CurseTheSky]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
A two-disk RAID 0 array will store half the data stream on each of the two disks. That'll be striped on alternating disks as a minimum of 512 Byte-long stripes. While this information would be normally be considered useless for recovering data, it's POSSIBLE to get useful (albeit short and broken) information. Assuming the disk is readable at all.

If that concerns you, then you have to decide if you trust Western Digital with half of your data. WD certainly has procedures that it believes adequate to avoid data being leaked outside their plant. If you don't trust them, then you have no choice but to destroy the drive. A sledge hammer should be adequate.

That pretty much sums it up. The way I'd play it:

If someone could basically ruin my life or cause extreme hassles down the road based on data that's on the drive, I'd destroy it.

If someone might be able to get my credit card number off the hard drive and there wasn't much else that I was concerned about, I'd RMA it.