A dropped disk, a rebuild that died half-way or a failed controller doesn't have to mean the end of a RAID 5 — the data is usually still sitting on the members. We image every drive and reassemble the array in software, never writing to your originals.
Every RAID case starts with a free diagnostic. From £500 + VAT priced per disk, one written quote before work begins, and logical rebuilds carry no fix, no fee.
One lost disk is survivable in RAID 5 — the trouble starts with the second. These are the failures we see from Swansea servers and NAS units.
Swapping in a replacement sends hours of heavy reads across survivors that are already old and tired. When one of them gives up mid-rebuild, a degraded array becomes a dead one — far and away the most common RAID 5 emergency.
Healthy disks can be held hostage by failed hardware around them. Until the configuration and parity metadata are read back from the members, the volume stays offline even though the data is intact.
Once a disk has dropped out, its contents freeze in time while the array moves on. Re-adding it later mixes yesterday's data with today's and corrupts parity across every stripe.
Parity can absorb a read error on one disk — not matching errors on two. We image around the weak sectors on every member before any reconstruction is tried.
Dashboard 'repair' options, re-creating the array or initialising it can overwrite the metadata that describes where your data actually lives.
Adding capacity or migrating RAID level is a long, fragile operation. Interrupted part-way, it strands the array between two layouts and nothing will mount.
No recovery step touches your original disks. Each member is cloned onto a stable image using hardware imagers, with any mechanically failing drive repaired in the clean room beforehand. The disk order, stripe size, rotation and parity direction are then worked out from the images, the array is assembled virtually, and your files are extracted — the originals stay untouched throughout as the ultimate fallback.
Dropping in a spare and letting the controller rebuild feels productive, but on an array that has already spent its safety margin it is the riskiest move available: the rebuild works the surviving disks at full stretch precisely when they are most fragile, and one more failure turns a recoverable case into a hard one. If a rebuild has already stalled or errored, shut the machine down and leave it down.
Most RAID 5 sets that reach us are the main storage of a small business — Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant and Lenovo servers, custom builds, and Synology, QNAP and Netgear NAS units — sent in by firms across Swansea, Llanelli, Neath, Port Talbot and the M4 corridor. Disks are posted or couriered to our Bristol location, and business-critical arrays can move to the front of the bench. See our RAID recovery service and NAS recovery pages, plus data recovery costs for the pricing detail.
Power it off, send the members, and we'll rebuild it virtually — free diagnostic and a fixed written quote first.
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 Bristol 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.