Data Recovery RAID Drives
Data recovery RAID Drives
This paper addresses the data recovery raid from hard drives which have been used in RAID systems. There is a history of successful data recovery raid efforts when working with drives from RAID systems. RAID systems are unique in that multiple drives can be used to store the data and as the ‘R’ in the acronym states they are ‘redundant’.
This redundancy not only helps the system administrator or IT staff keep the systems running when a drive fails but also aids the data recovery raid engineer in recovery efforts when multiple drives fail. Simple mirror RAID (RAID 1) recoveries are far less complex than any other as the file structure(s) are intact on a complete physical volume. This data recovery raid mechanism simply makes a runtime copy of the primary drives‘ data onto the secondary drive.
This keeps a complete ‘backup’ of all information; losing one drive in this scenario is not an issue because the other drive contains all of the same information. We are more interested in data recovery raid topologies which use spanning across multiple physical volumes. The most popular of these is data recovery raid 5.
Systems which use multiple drives in RAID topology other than RAID 1 employ a data storage method called ‘striping’. If one drive in a striped data recovery raid fails, the administrator can replace the failed drive with a new one; using stored parity information, the missing data will be rebuilt automatically. If more than one drive fails a data recovery raid specialist is typically called in to retrieve the lost data.
Retrieving data from multiple drive arrays does raise the bar in terms of being able to recover data from a single participant drive; in these cases, the definition of ‘success’ is worthy of discussion. In arrays which span multiple physical volumes the key factor in determining successful recovery of user data is the stripe size. By default, most data recovery raid systems utilize a stripe size of 64K.
A common data recovery raid ‘s variant to this default is a 128K stripe size which, in certain hardware configurations, may produce better throughput and therefore is chosen by system administrators. Given that the stripe size defines contiguous storage block on a physical volume, files which are smaller in size than the stripe size are easily recovered on any single physical volume which had participated in a multi‐drive RAID.
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