RAID Data Recovery and common RAID levels for small businesses
RAID Data Recovery and common RAID levels for small businesses
Data is undoubtedly vital to both companies and individuals throughout the world. Technology has grown in leaps and bounds throughout the years and storage media has grown with it.
With such an amount of mission critical data stored within delicate mechanical storage systems, a company may not realize how huge of an impact a failed RAID server can make on their companies core functionalities. Data loss for most companies are not a mere inconvenience, but instead a huge financial liability and risk.
Here at IntelliRecovery Data Recovery, we fully understand the importance of your data and just how vital it is to the success of your company. With this understanding in mind, we have structured our infrastructure to allow the absolute optimal facilities and tools to give your company the absolute best chance to recover from your Raid Server.
No matter what configuration your company may utilize be it a RAID, array, SAN, NAS or any other disk server system, IntelliRecovery can recover it. IntelliRecovery engineers are armed with proprietary software and techniques to recover from all types of Enterprise storage systems.
Here are some of the most common RAID systems and how they work.:
(rād) Short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. RAID disk drives are used frequently on servers but aren't generally necessary for personal computers.
RAID configurations are designed to protect an organization from physical hardware failures at the disk level, which is a very common occurrence. RAID systems are a series of physical disks that act in concert to increase performance and/or protect the system and its data against the failure of any one disk (and in some cases, against the failure of multiple disks).
- RAID 0 This involves "striping" the disks, which distributes data across multiple disks but appears to the operating system as a single drive. This level offers no protection, but it does speed up disk operations in most cases. Most hardware- and software-based RAID systems support this type of array.
- RAID 1 Also known as disk mirroring, this RAID system duplicates any disk operations to multiple disks. When you write data to what appears to be a single drive, you actually write it to two or more disks. This level offers data recoverability, but it comes at the cost of performance, since every disk action occurs multiple times. Once again, both hardware and software systems usually support this type of array.
- RAID 5 Offering distributed data with parity, this RAID system provides data redundancy and increases speed. RAID 5 stripes data across multiple disks (like RAID 0) while maintaining a system of parity blocks that allow the array to know what data is on each physical disk, even if a disk is lost due to malfunction. This level requires at least three physical disks. In addition, you lose a portion of your space in order for the system to save the parity data and recover lost data in case of failure.
- For RAID 5, you generally need hardware-based RAID controllers. However, most servers come with a RAID controller option, so even smaller shops can take advantage of this RAID level.
- RAID 10 and RAID 0+1These levels are two of the most popular. RAID 10 involves mirroring a striped disk set to another striped disk set. RAID 0+1 stripes and mirrors to an identical set of disks, as opposed to only one disk.
Summary:
RAID-0 is the fastest and most efficient array type but offers no fault-tolerance.
RAID-1 is the array of choice for performance-critical, fault-tolerant environments. In addition, RAID-1 is the only choice for fault-tolerance if no more than two drives are desired.
RAID-2 is seldom used today since ECC is embedded in almost all modern disk drives.
RAID-3 can be used in data intensive or single-user environments which access long sequential records to speed up data transfer. However, RAID-3 does not allow multiple I/O operations to be overlapped and requires synchronized-spindle drives in order to avoid performance degradation with short records.
RAID-4 offers no advantages over RAID-5 and does not support multiple simultaneous write operations.
RAID-5 is the best choice in multi-user environments which are not write performance sensitive. However, at least three, and more typically five drives are required for RAID-5 arrays.
IntelliRecovery RAID Server Data Recovery Process
To begin your Raid server data recovery process, please call our toll free number (888-995-DATA) to speak to a Raid data recovery representative. He/she will provide you with a price estimate per your system specifications as well as go through a full breakdown of our Raid recovery process. You will be guided through our data recovery form so that our engineers have all the information they need to give you the best chance of recovery.
Once your media is received here at IntelliRecovery, it is immediately logged into our system. Customer communication is key in the Raid data recovery process. Once the customers’ media is received, an email and/or phone notification will be placed to confirm receipt.
Media will then go through an initial engineer diagnostic & evaluation to accurately determine specific media damage and or logical issues. From this assessment, engineers will provide a proper course of action for Raid recovery. From these assessments, IntelliRecovery may then provide customer with a firm and accurate price quotation. Once this report and price quotation is provided, customer will then be asked for their full authorization to allow our engineers to proceed with their Raid recovery job.
Once this quotation is approved, engineers will begin your full Raid data recovery process and will contact you throughout this process as updates arise.
Once engineers have fully completed the data recovery process, customer will then have a choice of return media for their recovered data. Common choices include, FTP transfer, CD-R, DVD-R and Target Hard Drive.
If you would like more information or initiate a data recovery job, please call 888-995-DATA(3282) or go directly to our Getting StartedPage.
