How the Prevention of RAID Failure Might Be Your Saving
Grace
Detecting and preventing data problems and subsequent RAID
failure before it happens is always better than trying to
fix them when they rear their ugly heads. RAID’s goal is to
increase data reliability, but as we know, technology
performance is not always as reliable as we hope it will be,
so we should always prepare ourselves accordingly. There are
ways for you to prevent the loss of your precious data, and
who wouldn’t want to avoid the drama of systems
mysteriously, leaving us without easy access to our RAID
drives. If disaster strikes, contacting RAID data recovery
specialists is your best bet, but there are ways in which
this tragedy can be prevented altogether.
There are reasons as to why so many businesses use RAID.
RAID drives have the ability to combine several physical
disks into a larger device and boast redundancy and
performance improvements. The most common area where we find
RAID failure is in the storage subsystem. The most obvious
way to prevent the loss of data is to constantly backup your
data, not matter how advanced your system. The sooner you
realise that data loss can happen to anyone, the sooner you
will be able to protect your data from RAID failure.
Advanced storage devices are designed to anticipate the
possibility of data disasters, but even advanced RAID arrays
can face failure. The way in which a RAID drive is supposed
to prevent failure is by supplying a level of fault
tolerance that will keep your storage subsystem out of
danger.
There will be times when one of your drives will fail whilst
the others in the array are still in perfect working order.
It is suggested that you label each drive and cable to make
sure that you do not remove a working RAID drive instead of
the RAID drive that has experienced the failure. Labelling
them will make it easier for you to match them to the port
on the controller card as well as to the drive numbers. This
may seem unnecessary, but it could be your saving grace in a
replacement situation.
Another common problem that arises with RAID arrays is that
many decide to purchase drives without knowing the
manufacturing details. There is the possibility that the
drives might all come from the same manufacturing lot if
they were all bought together. Using drives from the same
manufacturing lot can result in RAID access failure. It is
suggested that you implement RAID 6 if you have not done so,
which will help you recover from two separate failed drives.
In some instances, your RAID drive might be damaged and
there is nothing left to do to prevent RAID failure, in
which case your only option is to let the professionals take
over and recover data lost
Lauren wrote this article for MVI Data Recovery, RAID data
recovery specialists.
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