RAID 5 is the most common array we receive for data recovery.
RAID 5 is more complex than the more basic RAID configurations. Usually RAID 5 contains four drives of equal capacity. All four drives are written to simultaneously with the capacity of only three of them combined as shown in the picture. This has good performance benefits when it comes to reading, however write speeds are slow because it has to figure out which drives to write the parity to. It also has fault tolerance because parity is written to each drive so it can tolerate one drive failure without data loss.
Although RAID 5 has many benefits with performance and it can tolerate a single drive failure, a second drive failure will bring the entire array down. This is the most common type of RAID we receive from businesses. The main reason they fail is because of two drive failures. Most companies don’t notice when the first drive fails and this leaves the RAID 5 vulnerable since it can only tolerate one drive failure and not two.
RAID 5 data recovery can be very difficult since every failed drive needs to first be repaired. The correct order is needed, block size, offset, and which drive failed first must be determined with hex.
What You Should Do If Your RAID 5 Fails
If you’re located in the Philadelphia area call us to schedule an appointment to bring in your RAID 5 drives for recovery or visit the shipping page for instructions on shipping the drives to us.
RAID 5 is appropriate for…
