Raid Server for TV studios

We have recently faced and solved a very particular case of  Avid data recovery , one of the most established standard systems in television studios and recording studios.

The Avid brand is one of the most used tools in the world of cinema, television, broadcast and recording studios. Avid produces professional systems with proprietary software that constitute a real point of reference for professionals in the sector.

All Hard Drives installed inside the Avid systems can be considered as  Hard Disk owners of the parent company , even if in reality they are models already existing on the market to which the firmware is modified ad hoc to work within the Avid system. It is not possible to use any disk for the servers in question, these do not work and are not recognized as a system hard disk.

In these systems large volumes of data are stored due to which it is often difficult to find an efficient backup system, which is why most users rely on the hope that Avid’s excellent hardware will prevent data loss situations.

In case of failure of a Hard Disk optimized for the Avid system, there are only two roads:

Repair the damaged support with a data recovery operation in a clean room

Buy a new support directly from the parent company.

Since buying these media directly from the parent company has a very high cost, when possible it is always worthwhile to recover the data through the Avid data recovery procedure in a  clean  room, a process that is truly complex and not within the reach of all data recovery companies.

A failure case that required  Avid data recovery  was recently resolved by UAE Data Recovery technicians. A well-known television broadcaster turned to UAE Data Recovery labs to solve a very serious situation that arose on an AVID ISIS 5500 system containing 16 2 TB Hard Drives each with a 5 + 0 raid configuration.

The four raids 5 were combined in a single raid 0 that offers very fast parallel write access on 4 channels. As always, every advantage is paid and in this case the price to pay is data redundancy: the failure of one of the 4 raids is fatal for the entire data pool!

In cases like this the difficulties are not only related to the data recovery phase at the Hardware level (therefore the search for compatible Hard Disks for spare parts or the repair of the damaged ones), but there are more in reading volumes and partitions . Indeed, Avid does not use a FAT32 or NTFS file system but uses a proprietary file called AVID.

These problems have made  Avid data recovery  long and complex, especially as more hard disks have been broken within the system. In a case like this, where the file system used is AVID proprietary, the same is spread across all three arrays and so are the files contained in the system.

In a case of data recovery from the Avid video system, such as this that has been solved at UAE Data Recovery, when a server stops in 80% of the cases, the block can compromise the management and assembly of all the videos contained in the system.

Thanks to the technologies and procedures used UAE Data Recovery Dubai it was possible to recover and deliver all the data, to the great satisfaction of the customer television broadcaster.