Welcome to Cardiff Data Recovery, Wales’s No.1 specialists in RAID 1 recovery, providing industry-leading services for home users, businesses, and public sector organisations. With over 25 years of RAID recovery experience, our expert engineers have recovered data from thousands of RAID 1 arrays that failed due to hardware, software, or user error.
Whether your RAID 1 mirror is part of a Windows server, NAS device, or rack-mounted storage solution, we offer secure, reliable, and professional Windows RAID 1 recovery services with a proven track record of success.
🔧 What is RAID 1?
RAID 1, commonly referred to as a mirrored array, stores identical copies of data on two or more drives. Its main benefit is redundancy — if one drive fails, the data remains intact on the other.
However, RAID 1 is not a backup. If data is deleted, corrupted, or overwritten, both disks reflect the change. Additionally, hardware failure, controller issues, or RAID configuration problems can cause the entire array to become unreadable.
🛠️ Common RAID 1 Issues We Recover From
Top 30 RAID 1 Failures:
- One or both drives failed in the mirror
- RAID controller failure
- RAID marked as “Degraded” or “Offline”
- File system corruption (NTFS, EXT4, XFS)
- Logical volume missing
- Accidental disk reordering
- RAID 1 mirror mismatch
- RAID removed and re-added incorrectly
- Failed rebuild with faulty disk
- Unreadable disk sector errors
- Drive cloning mistake
- Motherboard/BIOS RAID corruption
- Accidental deletion of array metadata
- Power surge affecting one or both drives
- Software RAID mirror not mounting
- Failed firmware update
- OS-level software RAID array corruption (Windows Storage Spaces, mdadm)
- Disk initialised by mistake
- File system not recognised after rebuild
- Boot sector or partition table corruption
- Read/write head crash
- SSD controller failure
- SATA port failure
- RAID BIOS configuration reset
- OS does not detect RAID volume
- Virus or ransomware-infected mirrored drives
- File table corruption
- Sudden power loss during disk synchronisation
- Secure boot interference with RAID volume
- Background rebuild with unnoticed bad sectors
💻 RAID 1 Virtual System Failures – Top 20 Issues
In virtualised environments, RAID 1 configurations can also fail due to:
- VHDX or VMDK files stored on RAID 1 mirror not mounting
- Corrupted VM metadata stored on mirrored drives
- Misconfigured hypervisor RAID mapping
- VM snapshots stored across desynchronised disks
- Partial sync causes split-brain condition
- VMware ESXi or Hyper-V fails to recognise volume
- Power failure during live migration
- RAID rebuild completed, VM fails to start
- Disk signature collision between VMs
- RAID 1 disks out of sync, one with corrupt VM image
- Failed software updates corrupt VM file
- LVM corruption inside Linux guest
- Partition not aligned across both disks
- GPT table corruption affects guest boot
- Windows host update breaks mirrored disk bootloader
- Failed VMware Tools sync during snapshot
- BitLocker or encrypted VMs unreadable
- Guest OS data inaccessible after mirror rebuild
- Disk removed and hot-plugged out of order
- Conflicting drive UUIDs prevent virtual boot
Recovery Process for Virtual RAID 1 Failures:
- Clone each mirrored drive individually
- Manually determine most up-to-date disk via log and metadata analysis
- Virtual RAID reconstruction with VM container extraction
- Mount and repair VM file systems (NTFS, EXT4, HFS+)
- Extract and validate guest system data
🖥️ Top 15 Best-Selling RAID 1 NAS Devices in the UK
- Synology DS220+
- QNAP TS-231P3
- WD My Cloud Mirror Gen 2
- Buffalo LinkStation 220
- TerraMaster F2-210
- Asustor Drivestor 2
- Seagate Personal Cloud 2-Bay
- Netgear ReadyNAS RN212
- Zyxel NAS326
- Lenovo Iomega ix2-300d
- LaCie 2big Dock RAID
- Drobo 5N2 (2-disk RAID 1 config)
- WD My Book Duo
- Thecus N2310
- Promise Pegasus J2i (RAID 1 configuration)
🗄️ Top 15 Best-Selling RAID 1 Rack Servers in the UK
- Dell PowerEdge R250
- HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen10
- Lenovo ThinkSystem ST50
- Cisco UCS C220 M5
- ASUS RS100-E10-PI2
- Supermicro SYS-5019C-MR
- Fujitsu Primergy RX1330
- QNAP TS-873AeU-RP
- Synology RackStation RS1221+
- Buffalo TeraStation 7120r
- NetApp E2800 Series
- Thecus N8850U-10G
- Intel R2312WFT Server System
- Promise VTrak E5000 Series
- Adaptec RAID-enabled white box servers
💾 Supported Drives and File Systems
We recover data from RAID 1 arrays using disks from:
- Seagate, Western Digital (WD), Toshiba, Samsung, Hitachi (HGST)
- Kingston, Crucial, SanDisk, ADATA, Fujitsu, Maxtor, Corsair
File systems supported:
- NTFS, FAT32, exFAT (Windows RAID 1)
- HFS+, APFS (macOS RAID 1)
- EXT3/4, XFS, BTRFS (Linux mdadm)
- ReFS, Storage Spaces, LVM2
✅ Why Choose Cardiff Data Recovery?
- 25+ years of RAID data recovery experience
- Software and hardware RAID support (Windows, Linux, NAS)
- Skilled in recovering RAID 1 from all major brands and systems
- Fully GDPR-compliant and confidential handling
- Emergency 48-hour RAID 1 recovery service available
- Free diagnostics with no obligation to proceed
We’ve recovered data for financial institutions, government departments, educational facilities, and businesses across Wales and the UK when RAID 1 systems have failed.
📞 Contact Cardiff Data Recovery – RAID 1 Recovery Specialists
If your RAID 1 mirror has failed, or your system won’t boot, shows “Degraded” or is inaccessible, do not reinitialise or rebuild without expert advice.
Contact Cardiff Data Recovery today for a free RAID 1 diagnostic. We are your trusted experts in windows raid 1 recovery, restoring mirrored systems securely and efficiently.