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Sonnet Fusion R800 RAID – self-ejecting
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No backup at all? That is a very, very different situation than not having a current backup. I’m not sure where the idea of RAID being a backup came from, but it has certainly convinced all too many people that they can forgo backups, because hey, a drive might die, but the array won’t. Or something like that. But nothing could be farther from the truth. RAID is about uptime. It’s about the availability of data. It’s not a backup. Anyway, I suggest you schedule the appropriate flogging for another time because you really need to better understand the basics of how fragile this stuff is, how incredibly disproportionate the penalties are for not being prepared for the inevitable disaster. The only thing you don’t know is the scope of the future disaster. This one looks pretty bad but it’s made worse without backups.
You’re basically in a disaster recovery situation now. It’s really important that no further changes be made to the data on disk. The more changes that are made, statistically your situation gets worse. It’s possible to stumble forward in the correct direction, it’s much more likely a mistake will be made and things will get even worse.
If the hardware is designed and tested to work together, NCQ shouldn’t be a factor, it’s just a SATA command queueing algorithm so that the controller and drive can most efficiently fulfill read/write requests. If it’s set too high or too low, performance is degraded. But it’s possible there are bugs which can cause read/write errors.
Press the company for more help, but make it clear to them you do not have backups, you can’t afford to take risks, including mounting the array read only or rebuilding it. I personally wouldn’t rebuild this array until I had identical sector copies of every drive. If you don’t know how to do that, you’re going to have to learn how or prepare to budget for data recovery service. Also ask Sonnet support what RAID metadata format they’re using. Is it proprietary? DDF? IMSM?
When you’ve exhausted your options with Sonnet support, press them for a referral and discount code for a data recovery service. Call them and get a quote. This will be one of the phases of your flogging for not having a backup. RAID data recovery is really f’n expensive, so prepared for sticker shock. Report back when you have an update.
At least with linux software RAID, there is a way to force assemble an array that writes no metadata to any of the drives, and does not mount the array. Then it’s possible to mount the degraded assembled array read only and start extracting data. There’s certainly a similar procedure here, but I can’t tell you how agreeable Sonnet is in sharing this information, it may very well be that specialized data recovery companies have had to reverse engineer this process which is one of the reasons why I’m very skeptical of proprietary encodings.
Anyway, you have some homework to do.
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Trying to Rebuild the Array from the other drives should not change the status of the other drives nor should it change any data on those drives which can still be block copied later. The idea here is simple. Get the array online long enough to get the critical data off. A failing drive normally has a limited lifespan before total failure so the window is short. Trying other fixes before dealing with the data is wasting that limited time and forcing the issue to be very expensive data recovery. You can contact me directly via email if you can get another drive and have time for me to remote in and check the Atto panel. There still may be a chance here but I can guarantee you the clock is ticking if so.
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com -
hi eric and thanks for your help… the machine is actuallybusy at the moment but will be free tomorrow ! so i might contact you…. are you US based ? as i’m in europe i’m not sure bout our timeframe !? (its actuall 17h30 here at this moment)
Steve – Art Director – http://www.remedia.lu
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