It’s a sinking feeling to discover empty folders of what were once digital image files. It took Disk Warrior over a day to work on the disc, but at least in the end it mounted, with lots of folders of either corrupted data, misplaced data, or folders that were empty. To repair the disk initially, at their suggestion I used Disk Warrior 5, one of our favorite and most respected tools, and it was able to correct much of the damage, so that the RAID drives would mount, albeit with a lot of missing data, and corruption, but still it was impressive to even have the mirror operational. It was comforting to know that despite the corruption, the drives themselves weren’t at fault. The moral is that serious enterprise level drives are worth the extra expense, especially when used in a NAS or RAID.

We have run numerous diagnostics and certifications on these drives and have yet to find a single error. The drives themselves were Enterprise Level Seagate Drives, which have proven rock solid, and superb performers. So, their advice was to try to repair the volumes to get it mounted again. We reached out to SoftRAID tech support, sent them the logs, and the issue weren’t with SoftRAID, but with a corrupted drive (the drive connected to the external SATA unit) that corrupted the rest of the mirror. We did another restart, thinking it was just a glitch, but instead now the RAID wouldn’t mount at all. The RAID was created using SoftRAID 5.5.5, and suddenly after a computer restart, the RAID gave a warning error. To provide some background the RAID was a combination internal and external drive with an older MacPro tower, with 2 of the internal drive bays used for the RAID, and one of two other discs were rotating offsite drives that rotated out of an external E-Sata Firmtek 5 Bay enclosure. 6TBs of files, backed up, or corrupted, with one of the backup drives corrupted, and no easy access to the offsite access, this was an IT crash from hell.

Great, just what I needed during a busy week.

To make matters worse, even after other tools were able to get the RAID up and running, we were missing tons of files. Recently, we had a major data crash, a 6TB RAID configured as a multi-disc mirror became corrupted, and since it was a mirror, it dutifully duplicated the corrupted data.

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