RAID disks

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orangeblue

New Member
Hi,

I had a 2 questions:

1. If you had a system with 2 drives configured in RAID-0 running Windows 2000 (NTFS), is it possible to recover ANY type of data if you only have 1 of the drives? Keep in mind NO data has been erased yet.

2. Using the above system again. What would be the best way to erase each drive entirely?

TIA
 
quote:
1. If you had a system with 2 drives configured in RAID-0 running Windows 2000 (NTFS), is it possible to recover ANY type of data if you only have 1 of the drives? Keep in mind NO data has been erased yet.


Short answer: No. There is no fault tolerance in Raid-0, nor is there any way to tell where any portion of a file ended up on either drive. This is the downside of Raid-0: if you lose a drive, you lose all drives.
 
quote:
Short answer: No. There is no fault tolerance in Raid-0, nor is there any way to tell where any portion of a file ended up on either drive. This is the downside of Raid-0: if you lose a drive, you lose all drives.


The reason I bring this up is because the whole point of the Eraser program is to destroy data, so wouldnt having 2 drives in a RAID-0 setup be ideal once you no longer need the drives? since you can get rid of the 2 drives separately? Then you no longer would need the Eraser program or would you? Hope you guys can understand what im getting at.
 
quote:Originally posted by orangeblue
If you had a system with 2 drives configured in RAID-0 running Windows 2000 (NTFS), is it possible to recover ANY type of data if you only have 1 of the drives?
Yes, it would be possible to recover all data stored on that particular drive. However, recovering entire files is not usually possible, since portions of them are probably stored on the other drive -- this depends on file size, stripe size and RAID implementation, of course.
 
quote:However, recovering entire files is not usually possible, since portions of them are probably stored on the other drive -- this depends on file size, stripe size and RAID implementation, of course.


I see so say the strip size is 64K that means any file under 64K would be entirely intact and recoverable on one of the 2 drives correct?
 
Having a RAID configuration negates the use of Eraser. A RAID by vitue of its design is to protect your data, therefore in erasing a file you could not guarantee that there are no fragments left across any of the disks e.g. in this situation, defragmenting the drive letter would spread the data even further, so erasing data on a RAID that has just been defragmented would be even more difficult to guarantee erasure.
Your best bet to guarantee data erasure data would be to reconfigure the RAID drives as individual drives and use DBAN to completely erase the drives individually.

Garrett.
 
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