Hard Disk Recovery

A RAID system comprises of 2 or more hard disks that are combined to provide the storage capacity of both drives across 1 volume. The exception to this is RAID 1 which is a mirror. In other words the second drive is a duplicate of the first. If one of the drives in a RAID 1 fails then the other will retain the data. In most cases of RAID data recovery the problem is logical as opposed to physical.

RAID Data Recovery

The process of RAID data recovery involves several steps that depend on the type of RAID, and the type of failure. In this series of articles we are going to break down the different types of RAID data recovery scenarios and offer insight into why RAID’s fail as well as recommendations of which type of RAID is best for your situation.

As stated before the most common causes of RAID data recovery involve logical problems. These often happen when RAID hard drives go off line temporarily. Most times the hard drive lights are green, but when a drive goes off line it turns amber. This happens frequently in SATA RAID systems. SCSI back-planes also have a high occurrence of of amber drives. The problem is if a drive goes off line the RAID is operating in a degraded state.

When a RAID is running in a degraded state any further types of failure are fatal. The worse case scenario is that an engineer will see an amber drive and force a re-build. On a RAID 5 this can damage the parity and elevate the need for RAID data recovery.

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