A Guide to Different RAID Data Recovery Systems - By: Kim d

As the amount of data that people wish to store on their computers grows, more users – both at home and in business – are looking to RAID data systems to do the job. Many experts believe that RAID systems are the best way to store large amounts of music, picture and video files, and to prevent them from being lost in the event of a hard disk failure.

In the simplest sense, RAID merely stands for ‘redundant array of independent disks’ – or in other words, an array of multiple hard drives working together to boost performance or increase safe storage. There are several different varieties of RAID systems, which are known as levels – despite their innate differences. The most important systems for the home user are RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5.

RAID 0 systems are designed to increase a computer’s performance, via the method of ‘striping’ – breaking up data into fragments and writing it across multiple drives. The data throughput is drastically increased because all four drives are accessed in parallel. The downside of this is that even if one of the drives fails, the data can be corrupted or lost. RAID data recovery experts can often repair this but it is a risky undertaking.

RAID 1 systems are the most common form of RAID system. It writes data to multiple disks – known as ‘mirroring’ – and this means that in the event of one disk failing, the data is saved on another. This makes RAID data recovery much easier, since there will be a complete set of data on the other drive. The weakness of this system lies with the fact that performance is not optimised, in the way that a striped system would be. It can also be expensive since, for instance, two 500GB drives are required to get 500GB of data storage. However, when it comes to safety, this system is paramount.

RAID 5 systems are designed to optimise both performance and security by using both sorts of configuration. The system stripes the data across all the hard disks, but does not dump all of the parity onto a single drive. This prevents a delay while parity data is written onto one drive. With this, one disk can fail and there are no serious consequences, because the parity data will always be on a different disk. Again, RAID data recovery is relatively risk-free in the event of this happening.

However, there are concerns that as hard drives continue to expand in size; the risks are bound to mount. The more complex the system, the greater the chances of something going wrong, and the more important it is to have access to RAID data recovery experts.

About the Author

Kim is an expert author who enjoys writing articles on various technology related topics including data recovery.

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