Hetman RAID Recovery
Hetman RAID Recovery is a genuine RAID reconstruction tool, not a single-disk recovery app with a RAID label attached — it exposes real reconstruction parameters and covers a wide range of RAID levels, storage managers and NAS vendors. Its three license tiers also do something the rest of this catalog rarely does: gate a hard technical limit, not just usage rights — how many disks the array you're reconstructing is allowed to have.
What Hetman RAID Recovery actually does
Per Hetman's own technical documentation, the software recognizes and reconstructs JBOD, linear and concatenated arrays, and RAID 0, 1, 1E, 4, 5, 5E, 5EE, 6, 10, 01, 50, 51, 60 and 61. On Linux it covers MD RAID and LVM (including thin pools and snapshots), ZFS pools and datasets, and Btrfs multi-device layouts. On Windows it covers Storage Spaces (including Storage Spaces Direct clustered configurations) and legacy Dynamic Disks. On macOS it covers AppleRAID, CoreStorage/Fusion Drive, and APFS multi-disk containers. It also recognizes proprietary NAS layouts from Synology, QNAP, NETGEAR ReadyNAS, Thecus, Buffalo, ASUSTOR, TerraMaster, Western Digital, Seagate and LaCie — vendor-specific formats such as SHR, TRAID and X-RAID among them.
Automatic recognition and manual RAID definition
Automatic assembly is the default path, but when it isn't enough — a controller that doesn't expose clean metadata, a degraded array with an ambiguous member order — the software's own workflow exposes the parameters a manual reconstruction actually needs: RAID type, disk count and order, stripe/block size, start offset, parity layout and delay, block order, and missing-member positions. That parameter set is what separates a real RAID reconstruction tool from one that only handles the easy, cleanly-assembling case.
Encryption and disk images
Current versions support BitLocker, VeraCrypt, LUKS, Apple FileVault/encrypted APFS, plus file-level Windows EFS and Linux fscrypt — native unlock with a valid password, recovery key or key file, not password cracking. Recognized image and virtual-disk formats include the forensic EWF/EnCase (S01/E01/Ex01) and AFF/AFM/AFD/AFF4 formats, Apple DMG/CDR/TOAST/ISO, ASIF/SparseBundle/SparseImage, raw/IMG images, and VMware VMDK, Hyper-V VHD/VHDX, VirtualBox VDI/VMDK/VHD, Parallels HDD/HDS, and QEMU/KVM QCOW2/QED/RAW.
Remote and network sources
If a NAS or server is still running and reachable, Hetman RAID Recovery can add it as a remote storage source over SSH, provided the connection has root-level access to the underlying physical disks or block devices. That's a meaningfully different scenario from a NAS whose storage stack itself has failed — in that case the array needs to come out and be imaged, not scanned remotely. See Reconstructing NAS Storage Stacks for that distinction in more depth.
Array size: the license limit that's actually technical
Unlike most tiering on this catalog, which gates usage rights rather than capability, Hetman's own current license terms cap the number of member disks an array can have by tier: Home is capped at up to 3 member disks, Office at up to 5, and Business is unlimited. That's confirmed directly against Hetman's current license page, not carried over from an older release — worth re-checking again before this page's next update, since license terms are exactly the kind of detail that changes without much notice.
Checked August 2026: Hetman's purchase pages calculate current pricing dynamically by product, license tier, region and active discount. The license terms below are confirmed directly from the vendor; for the current price, use the link on each card.
Home version
ConsumerPersonal, non-commercial use, capped at small arrays — enough for a typical home or small-office NAS.
- UsePersonal, non-commercial only
- Array sizeUp to 3 member disks
- SupportsAutomatic RAID detection, hardware controllers, common NAS platforms
Office version
ProsumerInternal business and professional IT use, with room for a larger array — still not licensed for recovering third-party clients' arrays commercially.
- UseInternal business / professional IT use
- Array sizeUp to 5 member disks
Business version
ProfessionalBuilt for data recovery specialists and service providers — unlimited array size and explicit permission to recover other people's RAID arrays for pay.
- UseCommercial — recovering data for clients explicitly permitted
- Array sizeUnlimited member disks
If the array in front of you has more than 3 disks, the Home license genuinely won't cover it — that's a hard technical limit, not a soft usage restriction. Count the member disks before choosing a tier.
Important limitations
The remote-source workflow needs root-level SSH access and a NAS that's still operational — it isn't a substitute for imaging a NAS whose own storage stack has degraded or failed. Encryption support unlocks volumes you already have valid credentials for; it doesn't crack an unknown password or bypass encryption you can't otherwise access. And a manual reconstruction with the exposed parameters (stripe size, disk order, parity delay and the rest) still requires knowing or working out those values — the tool exposes the controls, but doesn't remove the need to understand the array you're rebuilding.
When to use something else
If the source is a single disk rather than an array, Hetman Partition Recovery is the right sibling product. For RAID cases needing DeepSpar-class hardware imaging integration, third-party sector maps, or an explicitly forensic workflow, the technician-grade tools elsewhere in this directory — R-Studio and UFS Explorer RAID Recovery among them — go further. See RAID, NAS and SAN Reconstruction Tools for how the different tool categories in that space fit together.