On Fri, 2006-11-24 at 20:15 -0700, Sterling Jacobson wrote: > I just had TWO of the four hard drives in my Raid 5 array die today! > > Now I need some help figuring out how to get my data back since I wasn't > exactly counting on a double failure. > > One of the SCSI drives sounds like two stones rubbing each other at 10k RPM. > The other just says "Media Error" from my Adaptec BIOS init. > > Any ideas? >
A two disk-failure is catastrophic, sorry. If the data is valuable, you can pay much money to a data recovery center. There is no way to recover your data otherwise that I know of, unless you can by some miracle get one of the two failed disks to work long enough to get your data off. The double-disk failure really is an Achilles heal for RAID-5. I'm installing a new disk array at work that is 10 raw terabytes. I'll be making it a RAID-6 (which is really RAID-5 but with two parity stripes instead of one), which should help mitigate this. There's no substitute for a backup, though! RAID-10 give the best odds, as the odds of losing any two-disk combination that leads to a failure is quite low. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
