How to tell if disks are RAID 0 or 1 ?

Discussions on using the professional data recovery program R-STUDIO for RAID re-construction, NAS recovery, and recovery of various disk and volume managers: Windows storage spaces, Apple volumes, and Linux Logical Volume Manager.
the dood
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Joined: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:02 pm

How to tell if disks are RAID 0 or 1 ?

Post by the dood » Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:07 pm

Hello,
I have an old Lacie firewire enclosure (model 300873) that does not mount on any computer that I own. I'm suspicious that the firewire controller is dead so I would like to attempt a recovery using R-studio. I have removed both drives and attached one to a generic USB enclosure. R-studio can see the drive and I am in the middle of creating a bit for bit disk image of the first HD. Is there some way for me to determine if the HDs were configured as RAID 0 or 1 or maybe JBOD?
Thanks.

Data-Medics
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Location: Providence, RI USA
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Re: How to tell if disks are RAID 0 or 1 ?

Post by Data-Medics » Mon Feb 12, 2018 10:18 am

This is actually quite easy. First off, look at the partition size. Is it a size that'll fit on just one disk? If so, then it's probably RAID 1. If the size of all partitions adds up to around the size of two disks put together, then it's either RAID 0 or JBOD.

Also, you can look to see if it has a partition table on each drive (which you'd expect for a RAID 1 mirror set) or you can just pick a random sector number (like 6,000,000) and see if the data matches between the two drives.

If it is a RAID 1 mirror set, you can just treat it like a single drive. Just know that it's possible that one drive could have been offline for some time and by out of date.

If it's not RAID 1 the next thing to try is assembling it as a JBOD which only takes a second. Just create a virtual volume set, put in the disk with the partitions first, then add the other and try opening or scanning it. If you find files that open it's a JBOD.

If that fails, then it's a RAID 0. Keep the drive with the partition table in as first, then the other, and just try every possible stripe size and see if you can open it and have files that open.

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