Cardiff Data Recovery is Wales’s No.1 specialist in RAID 5 recovery, with over 25 years of professional experience recovering critical business and personal data from failed RAID arrays. Whether you’re a home user, small business, multinational organisation or public sector client, our RAID engineers have the tools, facilities, and expertise to recover your data quickly and securely.
We recover from software and hardware RAID 5 arrays, including those in NAS devices, rackmount servers, RAID controllers, and virtualised systems.
🛠️ Common RAID 5 Failures We Recover
We regularly recover data from RAID 5 arrays affected by:
Top 30 RAID 5 Problems:
- Multiple Drive Failures
- RAID Rebuild Failure
- RAID Controller Failure
- Logical Volume Corruption
- Parity Drive Failure
- Drive Removed and Reinserted in Wrong Order
- Hot Spare Rebuild Interruption
- Stripe Corruption
- Inconsistent Parity Errors
- RAID Metadata Loss
- Firmware Bug During Rebuild
- Disk Initialised by Mistake
- Sudden Power Failure Mid-Rebuild
- Partition Table Loss
- RAID BIOS Reset
- Block Size Mismatch
- Corrupted RAID Configuration
- Drive Cloning Mistake
- Controller Battery Backup Failure
- Rebuild Attempt with Bad Sector Drives
- Damaged Superblock on EXT File System
- RAID Seen as Degraded or Foreign by Controller
- Failed Migration or Expansion Attempt
- Background Parity Check Caused Write Errors
- Wrong Disk Identified as Spare
- Mismatched Sector Sizes
- Bit-Rot Detected in Parity
- RAID Offline After Firmware Update
- OS Level Software RAID Corruption
- Manual RAID Deletion by Mistake
Technical Recovery Process for Each Failure Includes:
- Disk imaging and sector-level clone
- Virtual reconstruction of RAID parameters (stripe size, disk order, parity rotation)
- Custom RAID emulation and parity analysis
- File system repair or raw extraction
- Verification of logical volumes and metadata structures
- Recovery from physical disk degradation, including bad sectors or firmware faults
🔧 Virtualised RAID 5 Failures – Top 20 Problems
Many RAID 5 systems operate under virtual machines (VHDX, VMDK, QCOW2), and we frequently recover:
- Corrupt virtual disk headers
- Snapshot chain corruption
- Orphaned or dismounted VM disks
- Failed RAID under Hypervisor (VMware, Hyper-V, Proxmox)
- Corrupted VMFS/NTFS volumes
- Partially overwritten VHDX files
- Failed live migrations
- VM datastore inaccessible after RAID degradation
- Power cut during VM disk expansion
- vSAN corruption
- Guest file system corruption within VM
- VM drive file deleted or moved
- Faulty disk cache sync in VM host
- Thin-provisioned disk corruption
- RAID rebuild broke guest disk consistency
- Snapshot rollback failure
- Broken LVM inside Linux guest
- Encrypted VM disk inaccessible after host failure
- RAID rebuild completed but guest files missing
- Recreated VM folder structure but files unreadable
Recovery Process:
- Clone all RAID disks
- Virtually rebuild the array using forensic RAID tools
- Mount and extract VMs from recovered RAID volumes
- Deep repair or carving of VM contents (VHDX, VMDK, etc.)
- Recover guest files (Windows or Linux)
💻 Top 15 Best-Selling RAID 5 NAS Systems in the UK
- Synology DS920+
- QNAP TS-464
- Netgear ReadyNAS RN424
- Buffalo TeraStation 5410DN
- WD My Cloud EX4100
- Asustor Lockerstor 4
- TerraMaster F4-423
- LaCie 2big RAID
- Drobo 5N2 (legacy)
- Lenovo Iomega ix4-300d
- Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS
- QNAP TVS-672XT
- Synology RackStation RS820RP+
- Thecus N4810
- Promise Pegasus R4i
🖥️ Top 15 Best-Selling RAID 5 Rack Servers in the UK
- Dell PowerEdge R740
- HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10
- Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650
- Supermicro SuperServer 6029P
- Cisco UCS C220 M5
- ASUS ESC8000 G4
- Fujitsu Primergy RX2540
- IBM x3650 M5
- NetApp FAS2750
- Dell PowerEdge T640
- QNAP TS-h977XU-RP
- Synology RackStation RS3621RPxs
- Seagate Exos X 5U84
- Buffalo TeraStation 7120r
- Adaptec RAID 8805-equipped OEM servers
💾 Supported RAID 5 Storage Manufacturers
We recover RAID 5 arrays containing disks from:
- Seagate
- Western Digital (WD)
- Toshiba
- Samsung
- HGST (Hitachi)
- Kingston
- Crucial (Micron)
- SanDisk
- ADATA
- Fujitsu
- Maxtor
- Corsair
✅ Why Choose Cardiff Data Recovery?
- Over 25 years of RAID 5 recovery expertise
- Full support for NAS, rackmount, and software RAID systems
- Virtual RAID builders and custom parity analysis tools
- Recovery of virtual environments (VMware, Hyper-V, Proxmox)
- Trusted by corporates, government bodies, and IT service firms
- GDPR-compliant, confidential data handling
- Free diagnostics with no obligation
- Emergency 48-hour service available for business-critical cases
📞 Contact Cardiff Data Recovery – RAID 5 Experts
If your RAID 5 system has failed, is not rebuilding, or shows missing volumes or inaccessible VMs, don’t risk further damage by attempting DIY rebuilds or software scans. Our expert engineers can safely reconstruct and recover your RAID.
Contact Cardiff Data Recovery today for a free RAID 5 diagnostic. We’re your trusted partner in professional raid 5 recovery




