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RAR / Every level and layout / RAID 50 and RAID 60

RAID 50 · RAID 60 · spans · MD1200 · MD1400 · MSA · PERC H810 · H840 · 12 to 48 members

RAID 50 and RAID 60 data recovery. Two or more RAID 5 or 6 spans, striped together, and one span exceeding its tolerance takes the volume.

RAID 50 stripes data across two or more RAID 5 spans; RAID 60 does the same with RAID 6 spans. Each span tolerates its own failures, one or two, and the volume survives as long as no single span exceeds that. They live in shelves: a Dell MD1200 or MD1400 behind a PERC H810 or H840 with twelve or twenty-four members in two or three spans, an HPE MSA, a Supermicro CSE-846 on MegaRAID, and they fail the way shelves fail, with an expander that drops every member at once, or two drives from the same span that were bought together and reached the same hour. On the bench a RAID 50 is several RAID 5 reconstructions and then a RAID 0 across them: per-span order, stripe and rotation, then the span order and the span stripe. Shelves and larger sets start at £1,250 + VAT after the free look, fixed in writing, 10–15 days at the bench.

Free first lookOne fixed figure in writingNo data, no bill on most jobsReturn postage paid

Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
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Power down. Label every slot before a drive comes out. Do not rebuild, do not force a drive online, do not import or clear a foreign configuration, do not initialise, and do not run chkdsk, fsck, zpool import -F or mdadm --create on the members. A rebuild reads every sector of every survivor and writes to the replacement; each of the commands writes to the drives. On images, all of them are reversible. On the originals, none of them is.

RAID 50 and 60 symptoms, and what each means.

Not listed? Describe it on the form →
One span degradedStill tolerant elsewhere; none in that span. Image its weak members.Do not delay
Two members gone in one span (RAID 50)The volume is offline. Every member imaged.Do not delay
Whole shelf foreign after an expander failureRestore the expander with the head off; do not clear.Do not delay
Rebuild in one span stalledA survivor's read error. Power down.Do not delay
Controller replaced; import failedThe spans' description is on the drives. Send the set and the old controller.Do not delay
Consistency check found mismatches in one spanA write hole or a stale member. Stop the check.Everyday job
Packing it and posting it: power down, photograph the controller's screen or export its log, and write the slot number on each drive with a marker before it comes out of its carrier. Send every member of the set, including the one that failed first; it holds the stripes the rebuild never reached. Each drive travels in an anti-static bag inside its own padding, in a box with nothing able to move. Send the controller if it was replaced or holds an encryption key; otherwise it stays. Insure the parcel for what the data is worth, use a tracked service, and know that the posting address is not printed anywhere on this site; it arrives by email in reply to the form, with a booking sheet to print; the sheet inside the parcel is what matches it to your enquiry when it is opened. Or hand the sealed parcel in at the nearest of ten drop-off points, your name on the outside and the sheet inside; say where you are on the form and it comes by email. We pay the postage home either way. The whole of it is written up on the guide to packing and posting.

What it tolerates, what fails it, and what the bench has to find.

Spans first, then the stripe across themEach span is reconstructed as a RAID 5 or 6 in its own right, proved by its parity. Then the spans are treated as members of a RAID 0, with their own order and stripe, which the controller's metadata records and the data confirms.
Same span, same batchTwelve drives bought together were usually slotted in order, so a span's members are consecutive serial numbers with the same hours. The second failure in a span is where it hurts, and it follows the first.
The expanderOne module fans one SAS port out to twenty-four drives. When it fails the drives vanish together and come back foreign; the configuration on them is intact. Cleared to tidy the screen, it becomes a reconstruction of several spans at once.
The drive listMake, model, size, slot and firmware for every drive, before the drives. On a shelf it shortens the job by days, and it is the first thing the bench asks for.

What a reconstruction has to determine.

Describe yours to us →
Unknown Where it is read from What goes wrong when it is guessed
Span membershipMetadata; parity consistency within candidate groupsA drive assigned to the wrong span breaks two spans
Per-span geometryMetadata; XOR (and Q) across each spanOne span reads as garbage
Span order and span stripeMetadata; file-system anchors across spansData alternates wrongly between spans
Stale membersEvent counts per memberOld data assembled into new files

From the parcel arriving to your files going back.

Work we have closed →
01

Logged the day it lands, and the first look costs nothing Free

A case number goes on the parcel and a number on every member the day it is opened, matched to the slot you wrote on it. Each member goes on the imager its interface needs, never on a controller, and its metadata is read before a sector is: the level, the order, the stripe size, the event counts that say which member is current and which dropped out first. An engineer settles what has happened to the set and how much of it can honestly be read back. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.

Nothing to pay for lookingA single figure, put in writingNo rebuilds, no imports, no initialise
02

Every member imaged, including the one that failed first

Every drive in the set is imaged sector by sector, weak areas last, on hardware that controls every retry, with a map of what could not be read kept for each. Members with failed heads go to the clean bench first; that is the drive site's work and the same bench does it. The drive that dropped out first is imaged too, because it still holds every stripe written before it dropped, and a rebuild that stalled part-way never reached them.

Sector by sector, weak areas lastThe first-dropped member included
03

The geometry, from the metadata or from the parity

A RAID 50 or 60 is proved span by span. Within each span, parity across the members at the same offset should XOR to zero (and Q match, on 60); that groups the members into spans and gives each span's order and rotation. The spans are then assembled as a stripe set, with the span order and stripe read from the metadata or found from the file system's anchors.

Metadata first, parity secondOrder, stripe, rotation, offset
04

Assembled in software, and repaired on the virtual volume

The set is put together from the images in software, with nothing written to any of them: the current members in, the stale member used only to fill holes a survivor could not give. The file system is checked and repaired on a copy of the virtual volume, VMFS and CSV volumes opened and the virtual machines' disks extracted, databases repaired where they need it. The originals are not touched again.

Nothing written to the imagesVirtual machines and databases opened
05

You see the file list before you pay

What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.

No charge until you accept the figureFresh media, supplied with the job5–10 days at the bench

What arrives most often

  • Send the drive list first. Twenty-four drives take days to image; the list, by slot, with model strings, lets the bench plan before the parcel lands.
  • A shelf that went foreign together lost a cable or an expander. Restore it with the head off; the configuration is intact and usually imports.
  • Keep the failed members. The first to fail in a span holds the stripes the rebuild never reached.
  • Say which controller, and whether it was replaced. PERC H810 and H840 metadata differ from MegaRAID's, and a replacement with a newer firmware sometimes refuses the import.

One job, followed all the way through.

UK · RAR-2026-0606JOB LOGGED ✓

A twenty-four-drive RAID 60 in an MD1400 behind a PERC H840, two spans of twelve, an expander failure that dropped the shelf, and a clear of the foreign configuration by an engineer who wanted the server to boot

Every drive was healthy. The configuration had been erased but no initialisation had run, so the data was untouched. All twenty-four drives were imaged, parity and Q computed across candidate groups to sort the members into their two spans and prove each span's geometry, and the span stripe found from the file system's anchors. The set was assembled in software and the file server's volume copied out.

100% of the volume recovered14 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case

What helps, and what harms.

Do this much first

  • Power down the shelf and the head
  • Label every slot; send every member and the drive list
  • Send the controller if it was replaced
  • Tell us the span layout if the configuration was known

What sets us back

  • Clearing a foreign configuration after an expander failure
  • Rebuilding a span with a predictive survivor in it
  • Deleting and recreating the virtual disk
  • Importing with a member missing

Questions answered before you commit.

One span of my RAID 50 has two failed drives. Is the whole volume gone?

It is offline, not gone. The two drives are imaged, the span reconstructed from images with the first-dropped drive's stripes filling the gaps, and the volume assembled across the spans.

My whole shelf went foreign. Are the drives dead?

Almost certainly not. An expander or a cable failed. Restore it with the head off and do not clear the configuration; it usually imports cleanly.

What does it cost?

Shelves and larger sets start at £1,250 + VAT after the free look, fixed in writing.

How long does it take?

10–15 days at the bench for a shelf.

Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.

RAID 5 →RAID 6 →Foreign configuration: import or clear →Dell PERC →Broadcom MegaRAID and ServeRAID →

Nothing gets worse while it is powered down.

Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the server off and the drives in their slots.

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Price my jobPacking and posting