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I have a 6TB RAID 0 consisting of 2x3TB WD Red drives.

It's been working fine but recently I went on my PC (which was still turned on and had been for a few weeks) and the whole partition was showing as "unallocated" in Windows "Disk Management" (the drive was not showing at all in "My Computer"). I'm using Windows 7.

The RAID was created with the built in Marvell controller on my Gigabyte Z77X-D3H motherboard.

I've tried to get the partition back using testdisk but it seems to be just finding a load of partitions which aren't what I'm after (despite only ever having it as a single volume)(I ran it for 24+ hours but it only got to 30% with tons of 200mb partitions):

TestDisk

I'm at the point of giving up and just restoring from backup (will still lose a few days worth of stuff I imagine but nothing devastating). Does anyone have any ideas before I do?

My other question was, how do I stop this happening in future? I'm considering just giving up with RAID and buying a single 6TB drive instead. I've had too many problems with the RAID just suddenly disappearing. I could understand if one of the drives had died, then sure, I know I'll lose the RAID, but just disappearing for "no reason" when it's still "ONLINE" in the BIOS seems weird.

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  • Raid 0 is for performance only with no redundancy, so its not really raid at all. You are better to use Raid1 mirror if you want data redundancy. Much easier to recover from issues in Raid1 also. Run a Memtest86+ on your memory modules
    – Moab
    Commented May 17, 2015 at 16:58
  • You did not explain the method that the raid0 was assembled, trying to use disk tools on a "broken" or dissasembled array that is no longer recognised by whatever hardware or software methods that assembled it, would result in an even bigger mess and increased likelyhood of loosing data, or damaging anything there that would be recoverable. Check to see how it is observed back where the raid was assembled. and possibly "fix" it at that level first.
    – Psycogeek
    Commented May 18, 2015 at 6:06
  • @Moab I know. Pretty much my only requirement when building the PC was to have a very large chunk of space showing as one drive (S:). Raid 1 would have halved that. I have all the data duplicated to my NAS and backed up online also.
    – BT643
    Commented May 19, 2015 at 18:36
  • @Psycogeek Not entirely sure what you mean? I created the RAID from the Marvell BIOS menu (Ctrl+M on bootup). A RAID 0 with (I think) all the default options it offered.
    – BT643
    Commented May 19, 2015 at 18:38
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    @Psycogeek Sorry, thought I'd added that. The RAID hasn't indicated any problems in the BIOS, both disks show as online and the full array says "ONLINE". Shows the correct size when booting.
    – BT643
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 5:49

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