If Drive B fails, the file system’s pointers (the metadata that says "File X is located at sectors 1,000,000 to 2,000,000") are now pointing to a black hole. The operating system sees the array as "RAW" or unformatted. Standard chkdsk or fsck will not fix this; they will make it worse.

JBOD configurations are the wild west of storage. They offer maximum capacity utilization by spanning a logical volume across multiple physical drives. However, this architecture has a fatal flaw:

In the world of enterprise storage, Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) gets all the glory. It offers speed, redundancy, and peace of mind. But lurking in the dark corners of server rooms and video editing bays is the humble, terrifying, and deceptively simple (Just a Bunch Of Disks).

Unlike RAID, where you can hot-swap a failed drive and rebuild, JBOD repair is a forensic art. It requires a specialized set of software tools and methodologies. Here is the definitive guide to the tools you need to resurrect a failed JBOD. Before we discuss tools, we must understand the pathology. In a standard RAID 5, parity allows data reconstruction if one drive fails. In a JBOD (also called SPAN or BIG), data is written sequentially: Drive A fills up, then Drive B, then Drive C.

By: Storage Tech Desk