CSSI Developed Disk Array Recovery Including RAID-0, -5 and -6

Based in South Africa, Computer Storage Services (CSSI) has developed a technology allowing recovery from multiple hard drive failures with a near perfect rate.

The technology and automation recovery system reconstruct RAID data and perform reconstruction on multiple drive failure RAIDs with a rate near 100%.

The company recoverd data from bad sectors, even after the defective sectors had been allocated or inaccessible sectors. This allows for complete recovery of data bases, file systems, email exchange or outlook files, and other file formats. However, this technology is a derivative in the data recovery field as it allows for the recovery of RAID systems where more than two or three drives had failed on a storage array, NAS or SAN device.

This technology, according to James Grcic, MD of CSSI, "allows us to reconstruct RAID systems that used to take us weeks … that now by analysing the RAID structure and automating the procedure, can be reduced to days, or in some cases hours through a unique intelligent way of calculated the sequence, structure and parity data algorithm of the failed devices and reconstructing the data even from defective sectors, that results in a perfect recovery of files, folders and the data volumes."

The method has been under development for just over two years with the understanding of the many different RAID settings, configurations and vendor specific RAID technology, algorithms and configurations, data can now be recovered with about a 40% cost saving and can be completed in 60% to 80% less time than the usual weeks it took to recover from RAID failures, and in most cases could not be even guaranteed.

All clients in 2012 that had failed RAIDs and requested a recovery have had 100% success with this new technology. In some cases the drives had mechanically failed and with the companies lab facilities and systems allowed the recovery of data from the damaged platters, failed heads or from hard drive crashes which then was reassembled, RAID configurations synchronised and the corrupted data was reconstructed each time.

The company is focused on R&D projects to improve recovery methods on SSDs, which CSSI currently has an estimated 75%-80% success rate. It however confirms that the reliability of SSDs is in the region of about 100-150 times more reliable that conventional HDDs, as the return rate is only a fraction of a percentage point in South Africa as measured over the past 12 months.