As the requirement for storage capacity rapidly increased, it was soon apparent that a single disk was not suitable to store the huge quantities of data being produced by many companies. To overcome this restriction, storage capacity can be expanded through the use of a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) array, which combines multiple hard disks so that they are presented to the host computer or server system as a large single drive. At one time a RAID was almost entirely used within the enterprise market, but over the last two decades it has become less expensive and more viable for small companies and home users to use a RAID when large storage capacities are required.
The RAID level which is suitable for you depends upon your storage requirements, which is based upon the following factors, data protection, transfer speeds and overall capacity. Most RAID architectures use redundancy, which uses some of the storage space to provide protection against data loss. The use of redundancy will allow the RAID array to be rebuilt following the failure of a hard disk drive.
For RAID arrays incorporating redundancy, when a single hard disk drive fails, the RAID will enter degraded mode, whereby it remains operational at a reduced efficiency. In the event of more than one hard disk drive failing at the same time, or the loss of the RAID configuration, such as corruption, the RAID array will fail and go offline. Once a RAID array goes offline, you should avoid taking any action which could risk the integrity of the data.
The recommended course of action is to contact a professional data recovery company such as DiskEng, who have extensive experience in working with all RAID schemes. When you suffer a RAID failure, the array, system or server should be shut down to ensure that no further damage can occur before speaking to one of our RAID recovery engineers, who can advise you how best to proceed.
No matter how complex the RAID system or the problem, be it failed hard disks, corrupt configuration data or a delete array, our RAID data recovery specialists have the required knowledge and experience of all RAID architectures and the underlying file system structures which will be present.
Never risk handing the hard disks drives from your important RAID array over to somebody with none or limited experience, as their lack of knowledge may compromise the safety of your data. You should always consult with a RAID recovery specialist about the procedures they will use before you trust them with your hard disk drives.
If they do not talk about securing the data from each hard disk in the RAID array as the first part of the process, it may indicate that they will work directly from the hard disks to save time, but this could put your data at serious risk. You should only trust your valuable data to a company with a full understanding of RAID architectures and hard disk data recovery techniques, such as DiskEng.
