RAID 6 is often referred to as striping with distribute double parity, offering an extra level of data security as it uses a pair of drives for data redundancy. It offers a reasonable compromise between data transfer speed, overall capacity and redundancy. Compared to RAID 5 it adds extra redundancy at a small cost to write speed, due to the requirement for writing parity information to a pair of drives.
With a pair of drives used for storing parity a RAID 6 array requires a minimum of four drives and capable of running in degraded mode when a couple of hard disk drives have failed. RAID 6 also. As with any RAID which incorporates redundancy, it is essential not to allow the array to run in degraded for any longer than necessary.
Running a RAID 6 array when a hard disk drive does not put your data at immediate risk, but with the possibility of another drive failing, it is important to rebuild the array immediately a failure is detected. If a second drive fails, the risk of data loss increases significantly, at which point it is essential that a rebuild is completed.
Although the risk of a RAID 6 array failing is much lower than with the more commonly used RAID 5 array, it is still necessary to have a backup strategy in place, as disaster can occur at any time. RAID 6 arrays are still largely used at the enterprise level, where full backup strategies and failover servers are often used, making it rare to see one arrive at our offices for data recovery.
For many years the DiskEng RAID recovery specialists have been developing the techniques required to recover the data from RAID 6 arrays. Our RAID data recovery engineers are therefore able to recover your files from a RAID 6 array following a failure of more than two drives.
