Exotics

A customer walks in and says: We need to recover a FATX volume, can you do that? - Sorry, no. Various exotic filesystems, btrfs, logfs, and even ReiserFs have always been considered a job for a data recovery serivce, not an automated software. Software is cheap, but only resolves common cases by applying typical solutions. Data recovery service is expensive, and applies its high fees toward the difficult cases, e.g. writing custom software to deal with just one specific case.

Lately, there is an influx of requests for something nonstandard. The latest hit was
- We have ReiserFs on the RAID5.
- Okay, no problem.
Turns out there was a problem. The RAID5 was using 512 bytes per block. JMB 393 controller. Oops.

So far we have delayed parity (from HP SmartArray), Promise RAID 6 with its non-standard Reed-Solomon, Promise 1E interleaved layout, exFAT filesystem recovery. The capability to recover RAID with a block size of 512 bytes is in the pipeline, currently undergoing testing.

So what's next? The spec for JMB 393 lists RAID 3 as a possible option, anyone actually ever used that?

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