With the budget required to afford a RAID system you might be a little surprised to find that RAID data recovery is required. Well, any RAID system provides increased data security by being fault tolerant but they are not fault proof systems. RAID data recovery will be required if there are multiple hard drives that fail or for some reason other serious problems occur.



When a drive from a RAID system fails, the system itself is able to keep functioning based on the built-in redundancy. The lost information that the damaged drive was storing will be regenerated on the fly from the parity data but the performance of the RAID system will be negatively affected and the state of the system will be recognized as critical or degraded.

This is the advantage of the RAID system, it can still run while a drive is damaged. But, it is not a good idea to live it running in a degraded status because you will be putting your data at risk. The whole array will be vulnerable while running in a degraded state, because the redundancy is disabled until the moment the lost drive is rebuilt. After the lost drive is replaced with a new one, the RAID controller will start regenerating the lost data on it, this process is called rebuilding. After rebuilding is done, the RAID system will be back to full efficiency.

As pointed out above, a RAID system can fail if multiple drives fail. If this happens your data might be compromised and you will need a RAID data recovery specialist if backup of the data was not made. Success rates of data recovery specialists are encouraging, especially with RAID systems. A respectable data recovery company has specialized facilities, equipment and software that to help them restore the data from the damaged drives.

There are standard recovery procedures for RAID data recovery. The system will be evaluated to detect the exact problem then the data from the drives will be extracted in separated images. From the drive images the information will be put together and saved on a media of your choice

The information that is usually stored on such high cost RAID storage systems is high priority information, probably important for business. For this reason, in the eventuality of problems with the RAID system shutting down the system is imperative and RAID data recovery specialists should be contacted.