Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1v8vjv8/i_tried_to_sell_an_old_areca_raid_enclosure_for/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/SalamekSG on 2026-07-28 11:22:08+00:00.

I was about to sell an old Areca ARC-5020 external RAID enclosure for essentially nothing. While testing it, I decided to investigate its apparently unusable iSCSI support one last time.

That was a mistake. :-D

I got iSCSI working, discovered and worked around a firmware bug that corrupted large Linux writes, then reverse-engineered the metadata and disk layouts for RAID0, RAID1, RAID1+0, RAID3 and RAID5.

The resulting Linux tools can inspect member metadata, reconstruct arrays into images, and expose RAID1/RAID1+0 as read-only device-mapper devices. RAID3 and RAID5 degraded reconstruction is supported too.

For the final test, I created a real four-disk RAID1+0, copied a 2 GiB file onto ext4, removed one disk from each mirror pair, reconstructed it directly under Linux, verified the SHA-256 hash and played a movie from it.

Repository and documentation:

https://github.com/Salamek/areca-arc5020-recovery

This was tested on an ARC-5020 running firmware V1.50. Other Areca models and layouts may differ, so the tools intentionally reject unknown configurations.