RAID recovery
In our computer technology age, storage devices have become an essential part of our life. Every day everyone of us creates more and more data incredibly easy - images, documents, music, videos, and emails. It would seem that we delete unnecessary stuff easily as well. However, in practice this doesn't happen - instead of tedious searching and finding out what we can and what can't delete, we prefer just to increase the storage capacity. Fortunately, data storage technologies develop constantly and offer convenient and inexpensive solutions of ever increasing capacity.
Integral part of the modern storage solutions is a RAID technology where several physical drives are combined into a single storage unit. Practically, this can be implemented using a controller (sometimes built into a motherboard) or by operating system drivers.
RAID is a complex device and each of its components can fail. Most of RAIDs designs are expected to survive the failure of some of the RAID parts, mostly one or two simultaneous disk failures. But there are failures (operator error, controller failure, software RAID driver errors) when RAID redundancy alone is not enough to recover RAID configuration parameters or data. In such situations the only solution is RAID recovery.
Here we discuss the following topics:
General RAID information
RAID recovery
- Basic rules in RAID recovery.
- Recovering data from NAS units.
- Physical hard drive damage in RAIDs.
- Destriping.
RAID recovery software comparison
Continue to Definitions.