Archive for July, 2014

RAID Data Recovery

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014

Of all the varying types of data recovery, the toughest is probably RAID data recovery, particularly RAID 5 data recovery. (For an explanation of RAID – visit the Wikipedia link here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID).

RAID 5 explanation

RAID 5 segments files and folders and writes their contents across all the hard drives in the RAID set. This makes recovering the data from broken RAID servers a complex task.

The thing with RAID is, that unlike conventional hard drive recovery services that recover the data from a single hard drive, RAID data recovery involves recovering data from all the hard drives present within a RAID set, and then piecing this data back together in order to form coherent files and folders. Files and folders are not stored as whole files on RAID 5 hard drives, instead the files and folders are split between all the hard disks in the RAID array. So for example, let’s take a 5 disk RAID 5 array, a typical file will be split into small pieces are stored across all the hard drives. Therefore should catastrophe strike, it is necessary to recover the data from all the hard drives in order to perform an effective RAID data recovery. RAID recovery is a tough business and there few companies that can actually provide a decent data recovery from RAID disks. An example company is http://www.emergency-raid-datarecovery.com/, who regularly recover data from all sorts of broken RAID equipment and are successful in RAID data recovery from all types of server whether it be Dell, HP, IBM or a custom built RAID system.

Many Network Attached Storage (or NAS for short) hard disks also use RAID and many NAS hard drives are found both in home and office environments. NAS RAID data recovery is also a highly specialist area and once again, because many NAS storage devices use RAID configurations, it’s necessary to find a decent firm that offer a NAS hard drive recovery service as well as have RAID expertise.