Recovering linux RAID 1 partitions + files on 1 TB drive requires more than 3.6 TB
Posted: 03 Nov 2026, 05:29
I have a number of old drives (WDC Black 1 TB sata HDD) that had between 2 and 5 RAID 1 partitions on them (EXT4 or XFS). Each RAID 1 setup had either 2 or 3 drives mirrored and I tried using testdisk on Rocky Linux 10 to save the files. Running the Quick Search works well and lots of recognizable files and folders turn up. When I go to save a partition that is about 600 GB I run out of space on the drive to which I transfer the data. I tried a single 2 TB drive, and when that ran out of space I used 4 of the 1 TB drives in RAID 0 to create a 3.6 TB partition. Once again, trying to copy these files from the 600 GB partition completely filled up the 3.6 TB RAID 0 array after 24-30 hours. How do I go about recovering these partitions and files without resorting to exceedingly large drives?