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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RAID data recovery can become a very complicated situation. Partial rebuilds are often a cause of data loss. When a drive goes out of the array often replaced by a new drive and a rebuild is performed. However, when another drive is forced out of the array because of failure during this process the result is an array left in a very bad state.
RAID data recovery can also become more challenging when these arrays are configured accross dual channels, making sence of the data left on disk can become a daunting task for any engineer. If possible, prior to performing any rebuild or any type of write functions to a damaged array make images of the media.
Hello,
My PC has a RAID set-up, and frequently one of my hard drives will go offline and I’ll have to rebuild it. This process takes about 3 hours and occurs atleast once a month. I have two hard drives. There is one slot where the hard drive goes offline. I replaced both the hard drive and motherboard but the problem still remains. Is there a way where I could remove the RAID setup and just use the hard drives separately? Or is there something else I could do to reduce the amount of crashes?
Thank you for your time
Are these the boot drives? Is it a RAID 1 or RAID 0. We have multiple solutions if you can answer this problem for you. What type of computer is it? Do you want to boot from the RAID or another port.
I have a 250gig Seagate Freeagent External hard drive. When I plug it in to the computer, the light goes in and out. The hard drive won’t open, but I can hear the hard drive running. How can I retrieve the data on my hard drive?
Thanks,