Lacie 6TB Network RAID

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
So yesterday I get in a Lacie 6Tb Network RAID (sorry it has no model number that I can tell). The IT guy who brought it in has no idea of the original configuration, and it's already been looked at by Lacie's "data recovery service" who said it couldn't be recovered.

So here's what I find. It has 4 - 1.5Tb Seagate drives in it. One which clearly had been opened before had catastrophically failed (black dust everywhere). Of the other three two are a bit glitchy, but so far are cloning without any bad sectors in DE.

Now I would normally assume on a RAID 5 configuration, but after checking the partition tables I find that all three drives have a single 1.5Tb partition. This would make sense only if they were all just mirrors, but the data doesn't line up making me think it is a stripe array or possibly an odd JBOD configuration...

That, or the data recovery "engineers" over there at Lacie did something stupid like initializing the drives before attempting to recover it. Any thoughts before I go to work trying to figure this beast out? I haven't dealt with Lacie RAID too much, only one or two NAS.
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
Update: So now that I've finished imaging the drives I went to see about rebuilding the array. Turns out it's just a Windows JBOD (which surprises me given that it's a Lacie rack storage NAS), and the failed disk is the first one in the series. So much for salvaging any file/folder structure. :?
 

ReclaiMe

New member
Any chance these are just a drives from Windows PC, not from the original LaCie system? I would be much surprised to see a plain Windows JBOD/Span in what is supposed to be a NAS. I would still check for some remnants of a RAID5. Just for the case someone plugged drives into Windows machine and made a JBOD out of it.
 

w.simon

Moderator
Hello

The last one Lacie, Low grey with Bleu button on the face, it was a Raid 0, customer told me was a RAID 6 (You know the friend who know about IT)
With my research on this was External 4 FS and lacie seems to give only RAID 0/ 1 or JBOD (individual drive)

The stripe size of the raid 0 was very small but not remember must check if i have done some notes.
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
No, it's definitely JBOD with no striping. I can recover large files in RAW, but there's no filesystem to be found anywhere. Which makes sense given that the first drive is the failed one. It might not specifically be a "Windows" JBOD, but definitely just a basic JBOD.
 

ReclaiMe

New member
Ah, "basic" JBOD is perfectly possible. I somehow imagined you found a Windows dynamic disk metadata on the drives.
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
You know to be honest, I don't think I've ever bothered to look at the metadata of a JBOD array before. So I wouldn't know the difference just looking in hex. Never took me longer than two minutes to determine drive order the old fashoned way.

I do believe that the software saw a dynamic volume on there, but that could have been something the other guys did while trying to recover it. Who knows. :?:
 
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