Apple Xserve RAID enclosures can have a wide variety of RAID configurations, but most are setup as a standard stripe set with parity ( RAID 5). The default RAID stripe is 64k (128 sectors). The data is striped across all the disks, and a parity block rotates between drives using the XOR algorithum. This way if one disk fails, the RAID card can default to degraded mode and run without interruption. A problem arises when there is corruption within essential parity blocks, or simply more than one drive fails at about the same time, not giving the IT professional enough time to replace the first failed drive. This results in a failed XServe RAID volume.

Other problems can arise with the different supported RAID options, such as hardware RAID levels 0, 1, 3, and 0+1. Also availiable are levels 10, 30, and 50, but these levels must be supported supported using host-based software RAID.

Our certified Engineers are familiar with the entire Xserve RAID family and have more than a decade of experience behind them. There are few situations that are not recoverable. For RAID recovery, our success is higher than 95%.

*Xserve is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. ESS Data Recovery, Inc. is not affiliated with Apple Computer, Inc. All images herein are property of Apple Computer, Inc.