I have an uncommon situation. I work as as IT administrator, I recently came across a box of ten hard drives that came from a company that we purchased a few years ago (before I started with this company). They are 72GB SAS hard drives that must have been part of a RAID array.
I have no idea what kind of RAID was used, which disks were where, or what kind of controller was used. I do know that they came out of an HP server because they all have the HP logo but that's really all I have. We have an HP server with a Smart Array P410i RAID controller.
My question is, is there any chance of me being able to access the data on these disks?
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1 Answer
Chance, yes. Worthwhile as a paid work endeavor - probably not. You actually don't have any information about whether or not they are even a RAID set (or how many different RAID sets they might be part of, or if they are merely spare blank drives) - they just happen to be a bunch of disks in HP drive trays. Could be anything. The odds that actual worthwhile, useful and money-making for your company data is on them seems rather tiny, if they have been in a box for years, un-used.
But, if you have time to waste, you can certainly take a look.
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my dilemma is this, I'd like to make use of the hard drives, however I don't want to delete data if there is some way of accessing it. Our business often needs to go back and look up info of events that happened in past (sometimes years ago). If the data is recoverable, I'd like to keep it for records, BUT if there's no way of accessing it than I may as well re-format and use the hard drives. I used a recovery tool on one disk to confirm that it does indeed have data on it, in fact, it looks to be a Accounting Database, which may prove to be useful should we ever need it....– StuartCommented Oct 8, 2013 at 14:31
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If you can pull usable data from a single disk, then the disks were either in RAID 1 (mirrored) or not in a RAID at all, and you can recover files as you will. RAID 0 or 5 or... should have some information in the disk headers that would aid in getting them back together, and/or sorting out what they were done with. But you still might want to check up the chain of command before putting too much time into them - or wiping them.– EcnerwalCommented Oct 8, 2013 at 15:06
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okay, I've played around a little in my spare time the last couple of days and still haven't had any luck getting into these. It may be something easy however, I've not had much experience with this sort of thing and am coming up short. I've tried plugging it into external enclosures and as a secondary harddrive in a pc, but the way the sata connection is formed it won't fit in anything that I have. So, I'm back to where I started. Is there anyway to just plug these in and have windows recognize them so that I can see the contents, when you say disk headers, what are you referring to?– StuartCommented Oct 11, 2013 at 21:45
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You said the drives were SAS. SAS and SATA are similar - but not the same. tomshardware.com/reviews/…– EcnerwalCommented Oct 13, 2013 at 3:49
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Ahh, my inexperience shows. You are correct, they are SAS and I was trying to use plug them in to a SATA connection, which is the only thing I have access too. I guess I should look to see if I can find an SAS connection and go from there. Thanks for pointing that out!!– StuartCommented Oct 14, 2013 at 13:06