tomtheappraiser

I have a 3 - 1TB Raid 5 set up on a Gigabayte GA-E7AUM-DSA2H MOBO. The OS is on a a 250 Gig IDE HD that is not included in the RAID.
Last week on of my 1TB went out. I had a bunch of data on there that I need very badly and quick, so I formatted a 750 Gig HD (That was from an external HD) and stuck it in there. It started rebuilding Friday and had gotten up to 76% by Sunday, but it won't go past 76%. I had thought that having 3 disks all the same size was an "ideal" thing, not a rule. I had thought that if you had a smaller drive, all of the other drives would operate at that capacity, which was fine with me because I only had gotten about 600 gig on there when it went down.

Is there any way to save this data? Does it have to do with the 750 gig, or the fact that it was an external?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

raptor_pa

No it is a rule, the raid splits stuff across the each drive in equal portions. The 750 is the issue and could have broken the array pretty badly. If you create the array INITIALLY with a smaller drive, then yes it will 'downsize' the larger drives to the smallest drive, but once the array is set up, it expects to see the same size drives all the time. Hard drives don't write things to physically contiguous space, they do not start at 0 and go up by 1, they write things to where space is available, and use logically contiguous space based on rotational latency and several other factors specific to the drive. You may be able to put a matching drive in and rebuild, if that fails then you could try r-studio and have it build a virtual raid and output the data to another set of drives, then create a new array and copy your data back. If that can't rebuild it then it's probably time to seek pro recovery, not at the local computer shop or big box retail store - probably looking at $3000 or better to get your data back off the raid if you have to go that route.