Hardware and RAID configuration

This was a HFS+ volume on a RAID 0, comprising two partitions on the same physical drive.

Problem:

The volume became inaccessible after some configuration changes. The customer tried to recover the data using File Scavenger®. However a RAID 0 definition in File Scavenger® requires two physical drives.

Diagnosis:

The main benefit of a RAID 0 is to combine the data transfer rates of multiple physical hard drives. For example if each hard drive is capable of write speed of 100 MB/sec then a 2-drive RAID 0 can theoretically achieve 200 MB/sec. Therefore there are no benefits creating a RAID 0 from two partitions on the same physical drive. Doing so actually slows down the transfer rate as the read/write heads must constantly move back and forth between the partitions. For that reason File Scavenger® assumes two partitions forming a RAID 0 are on two separate physical drives.

Solution:

File Scavenger® was modified too support RAID 0 partitions on the same drive.

Result:

Data was successfully recovered with the original filename and folder structure.