NTFS vs. RAID1

Ever since hard drives are not that expensive and even cheaper motherboards come with on board RAID support I mirror all my hard drives. It saved 'my life' twice already, so even right now I have a bad experience I'll keep on doing this.

The first time it saved my life was in my previous desktop system. It served me for 7-8 years long. In the last 2 years it got a new pair of hard drives, as the ones I had (mirrored) became smaller and smaller in size. And of course as they were that old they started to be slower, too. With HDD prices going down I thought it's a good investment to keep my machine running. When I migrated my data over I realized that the drives were in a bit worse condition than I thought and it was really time to replace them. If it wasn't for RAID1 I would have lost all my pictures, music etc. long ago!

The second time it saved me was in my Seagate NAS. The new desktop I spent €1000-1200 onis in a nice looking case from Thermaltake. Micro-ATX... Meaning there's no room for anything in that case. It was a stupid idea I know now... So I needed disk space and I wanted a network attached storage and I happen to choose Seagate BlackArmor. Bad choice, but what can I do now. After 5 months one of the drives died completely. I have it replaced under warranty, and again RAID1 saved me, as the second drive also had all my data!

Over the weekend I realized that RAID1 helps you with hardware failure, but it's a curse for logical failures. I happen to run out of the 2TB on my NAS so being disappointed in its performance, this time I got and eSATA unit from Western Digital (MyBook Studio II). First thing I did I set up RAID1 on it. I've been trying to update its firmware ever since I got it, but the update program never seemed to find the unit (even though I followed the instructions), so I gave up. I think that just stroke back yesterday. The NTFS file system's MFT (Master File Table) got screwed up. Both the primary and backup. And as it's RAID1 it got synced over to the second disk. Damn!

I've tried all the tricks I've found on the internet without any luck. So there's nothing left here to do: restore the files. I was searching for tools online and purchased to cheapest solution: Restore Ultimate for $29.99 So far it seems to do the trick. In about 6-7 hours it scanned the drive and found the files. Even the ones I deleted long long time ago. Luckily the 2TB drive had only about 500GB data. At the moment I'm copying the found files to another drive. It's running for about 10-12 hours now, but it looks promising. All the digital photos I took over the years would have been gone otherwise, so I'm really grateful for BitMart Inc!!!

I don't think it's a hardware failure. Must have been a bad correlation of many the things (eSata, older firmware etc.) Probably an algorithm logic hiccup that is not handled well caused all this. I couldn't really find articles online what would make both the MFTs to blow up, but one would think there's some safeguards built in... Even RAID controllers could identify something like this and would report and error and would not corrupt the second drive. Somebody didn't test the algorithm well enough...

So I'm annoyed but not devastated thanks to my $30 investment that seems to work. And one more thing I've decided: if I'm in the need for getting more disk space, I'll build a cheap Linux machine and put it in a big case with lots of hard drives and that will be my file server. I don't trust these small external drives any more. I would probably need a UPS too for that machine, to safeguard the disks on them. Linux doesn't seem to tolerate hard reset very well... I've already made some calculations. From $1000 I could create a 4TB RAID1 array in that machine and expanding it would be easy too.