TL;DR: my parity drive has failed. Insurance/extended warranty wants to inspect the drive before they decide it can't be fixed and deserves a replacement/refund. Drive is too far gone to be wiped. Is data written to the parity drive by Unraid something readable which a data specialist could extract? I have critical personal files on there which I'm not comfortable sharing.

My parity drive has failed recently, with increasing numbers of reallocated sectors and other SMART errors. I pulled it from Unraid as soon as it became clear it wasn't a one-off issue, but a cascading failure.

I chose an extended warranty on that drive, due to it being a refurbished drive. The insurance company has accepted my claim.

But they want the drive to "make sure it can't be fixed", before they decide to replace it or refund it. There's already a DHL pickup scheduled for tomorrow, before I could say anything. I'm wary of giving them the drive, since I have critical personal information on there: from copies of ID and banking statements to girlfriend's nudes, with everything you could possibly imagine in between. Basically all you need for identity theft and/or extortion.

I obviously can't wipe the drive before the pickup, since it's failing hard. I've turned it back on a few times in Windows on a 3.5" to USB adapter to diagnose with CrystalDiskInfo and HDD Sentinel. But now it's not recognised in Windows anymore.

Is the data written to the parity drive something which could be readable to a data recovery specialist? Which is who I assume the drive is going to once DHL picks it up for the insurance company. As the TL;DR said, there's tons of stuff on my array which is none of their business.

I'd appreciate any information or help you may have on this. Thanks!

Unless you had only 1 data drive (a special case where parity is a mirror of the disk), then there is no user data on a parity drive that is retrievable even by a specialist.

Thanks for your answer! I do have 4 x 16TB + 1 x 16TB parity, so I'm good then.

I guess I got lucky it was the parity drive this time. What solutions are open to me, to protect my privacy if I have to send in array drives for warranty next time? Encryption (XFS encyrpted?) is the only solution, correct?

Edited June 11Jun 11 by SinoBreizh

Yes - you would need to use an encrypted file system to be able to send data drives in without a chance o data off them being retrievable.

However bear in mind that encryption leaves you less recovery options if anything goes wrong when trying to rebuild a failed drive so do not encrypt drives that do not need it.