Data Raid Recovery: Data Loss Still Happens
By Jon Wuebben
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. This technology is typically a reliable storage option for computer users and has better read/write speeds vs. single drive servers. If a drive fails, they also have better fault tolerance and usually, superior data protection. However, there are times when you could be faced with a data raid recovery situation.
Why are these systems so ideal for data protection? They allow data to be written to multiple hard disk drives so that a failure of any one drive in the array does not result in the loss of any data. As a result, many businesses rely on them to handle critical data such as financial information and business system data such as email, database application data, etc. Although they are typically safer than other storage media, these systems are still susceptible to total system failures. How? Multiple drives can experience simultaneous problems. And the problem with this type of data loss issue? The business can come to a screeching halt because data stored on the RAID array is usually business critical. That's a big problem.
History
The RAID idea was developed at the UC Berkeley by researchers, David A. Patterson, Garth Gibson, and Randy H. Katz. They were working to produce prototypes of five levels of these types of storage systems. Their ideas laid the groundwork and formed the genesis of today's complex RAID storage systems.
What were the researchers design goals? To provide performance improvements, storage reliability and recovery, and scalability. The redundancy concept employed in these types of systems is special. It helps to recover if one drive should fail within the system. But no worries - if one drive is off-line, RAID controller cards can continue to read and write data
Levels
Level 0 provides what is called data striping. This essentially spreads out blocks of each file across multiple disks, but no redundancy. This is great for performance; however, it's weak on delivering fault tolerance. With the collection of drives in a RAID Level 0, data can be accessed from multiple drives in parallel. Why? This type of array has data organized in stripes across the multiple drives,
Level 1 provides an ingenious idea - disk mirroring. With this concept, data is written to two duplicate disks at the same time. If one of the disk drives fails, the system can switch to the other disk without any loss of data or service. RAID 1 enhances read performance, but the improved performance and fault tolerance are at the expense of available capacity in the drives used.
Of all the levels. level 5 is the most frequently implemented. It provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information which dramatically improves performance and helps to recover any lost data when a single drive fails.
Data recovery providers can fix broken RAIDs, don't allow your IT team to fix the system by relying on the original configuration, or documented administrative procedures. Also, don't force a RAID controller into a particular configuration. This could result in even greater damage to your data. Data recovery specialists typically figure out the RAID manually by looking at every sector of data across all of the drives in a system to put it back together. The original configuration may have flaws in it. Knowing that, they rebuild distributed data blocks, and drive order and data symmetry, until it is restored. Specialists can even work on these types of systems if the original hard drive has failed by reconstructing the RAID virtually. An advantage of data raid recovery is its ability to get back the most recent files versus the most recent backups. This is important to know because RAIDs often store the highest value data.
About the author
ITS - Data Recovery has been providing professional data recovery, data repair, computer forensics and evidence recovery services and software since 1980. Located in Los Angeles and serving clients around the world. For inquiries, contact http://www.datarecoveryspecialist.com/ or (818) 727-1500 from http://www.FreeArticlesAndContent.com
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