Normal aspects, useful for RAID Data Recovery

The storage failure always causes panic; even in case of complete data backup due to the time and effort it requires to restore all information. Such failures cause more damage when organizations face RAID array failure. RAID or Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks can encounter various types of failure for its different levels. While some of them can compensate one disk failure, others can do it for multiple. In any such case, RAID Data Recovery service can assist a user to retrieve the lost data.

Few standard RAID levels are RAID 1 that follows mirroring, RAID 0 that follows striping and RAID 5 that follows parity summing. Following are the redundancy description of few RAID levels.

• If n is referred to number of drives used then RAID 1 offers redundancy of n-1 drives, where n is generally 2.
• If n-1 is the storage volume of RAID 5, then it permits one redundant drive.
• If RAID 1+0 contains two-mirrored RAID 0 arrays and each of them has five disks, then the minimum redundancy gets counted as 1 and maximum as 5. This is based on the consideration that the affected drives are of same array.
• If RAID 5+1 contains two-mirrored RAID 5 arrays and each of them has five disks, then the minimum redundancy comes out as 3 and maximum as 6.
• In RAID 5+5 array, three independent RAID 5 arrays are considered while each of them has three disks. This allows minimum redundancy as 3 and maximum as 5.

When a RAID array fails, data needs to be recovered using productive recovery measures that involve RAID specific utilities (which depend upon the RAID array or arrays being used) and RAID specific recovery practices (which are almost the same as the normal hard disk recovery). This is the specialized data recovery domain that deals with failed RAID hard drives and is specifically termed as RAID Recovery service. Under the service, failed hard drives are analyzed for cause of crash, repaired (physical repair is also done, if necessary) and data is extracted from the affected drive.

Hard Drive Recovery Service is best carried out under Clean Room environment because of everything under control that may further damage a corrupted hard drive. Such factors may be summarized as dust particles, temperature, humidity, pressure etc. It involves careful recovery procedures plus more technical approach as compared to standard hard drives.