Exceptional recovery from catastrophic RAID0 failure — delivered ahead of deadline
I rarely write reviews, but PITS earned this one. The situation: Our client's production server experienced a complete RAID0 failure. Two Seagate enterprise drives, both 8+ years old (over 71,000 operating hours each), failed within the same incident. One drive had physical/electronic failure requiring cleanroom intervention. The other had 96 active bad sectors. The ext4 filesystem was severely corrupted with an unallocated root inode. The drives held our client's entire production database — financial services data with no recoverable backups elsewhere. By the time we engaged PITS, software recovery had been thoroughly exhausted. Multiple mount attempts failed. fsck couldn't complete its first pass due to I/O errors. This was a job that needed professional cleanroom equipment, expertise with RAID reconstruction, and someone who could rebuild corrupted ext4 file structures. The team: Zac was our lead technician and the reason this recovery succeeded. He used PC-3000 professional equipment, correctly identified all RAID metadata (matching the original UUIDs from our pre-failure diagnostics), and successfully reconstructed the filesystem structure. When the second drive required cleanroom work in the USA, he coordinated the physical repair and imaging process efficiently. Most impressively, he worked evenings and weekends to compress what could have been a 10-14 day recovery into a delivery ahead of his promised Wednesday deadline. The work quality was excellent — recovered files maintained their original directory structure, filenames, and timestamps. He even rebuilt the file structure manually after structural damage, rather than just dumping recovered files into a lost+found mess. Eric managed our account and was instrumental in helping us make decisions under significant time pressure. When we faced choices about timeline tiers, recovery scope, and shipping logistics, Eric explained tradeoffs clearly without pressure tactics. He responded promptly to questions across time zones (we're UK-based, client in Sri Lanka, recovery in the US). Honest, professional, helpful. The outcome: We recovered our priority data — production database backups in /opt/all_db — with original folder structure intact. File integrity verification showed our .gz backup files were valid and restorable. We were able to rebuild our client's MySQL environment on a new server and restore operations before Monday morning business hours in Sri Lanka. The client experienced minimal downtime visible to their end users. Cost considerations: The pricing was at the higher end of the market, but commensurate with the work involved (cleanroom recovery on enterprise drives, RAID0 reconstruction, ext4 filesystem repair). Given the alternative — total business data loss — the investment was justified. The pricing was transparent: we understood what we were paying for, what the success criteria were, and what the timeline would be. Would I recommend PITS? Without hesitation, for serious data recovery situations. They have real cleanroom capabilities, professional equipment (PC-3000), and technicians who actually know what they're doing. Zac and Eric in particular made what could have been a catastrophic incident manageable. Specific recommendations: If you're facing RAID failure, especially RAID0 or complex configurations, PITS has the expertise If you have failing drives that need cleanroom intervention, they have the facility If communication and clear decision-making matter to you, ask for Eric If you want a technician who'll go the extra mile to deliver ahead of deadline, ask for Zac Thank you to the entire PITS team for getting our client back online when it mattered most.