RAID Acquisition Computer Forensics COEN 152/252
RAID Levels RAID 0:Just a Bunch Of Disks (JBOD) RAID 1: Mirrored RAID 5: Redundancy through parity distributed parity
RAID Hardware RAID Two types: Special controller that plugs into one of the buses Device that plugs into normal disk controller such as ATA, SCSI, Firewire, … Computer sees a single volume
RAID Hardware RAID acquisition Step 1: Acquire and investigate complete RAID volume as a single volume Needs big target device. Use device drivers such as those contained on Linux distributions Step 2: Acquire individual disks and look for hidden data in possible areas that the RAID volume did not use. Keyword searches can also be performed on the individual disks.
RAID Software RAID OS sees individual disks But sees them together as a single volume. CPU calculates parity info.
RAID Software RAID Easiest: Acquire entire volume Encase, ProDiscover can import disks from a Windows RAID volume and analyze them as a single volume. Allows access to data that is hidden on individual disks.