RAID Hard Drive Failure Tips

No matter which way you slice it, RAID drive recovery is one of the most complex forms of data recovery service available today. Because a RAID system consists of more than just a single hard disk drive, professional care must be taken not only to extract the data from the RAID drive for recovery, but also to rebuild the RAID array safely, and without data loss on the other drives within the array.

The beauty of the RAID storage system is both in its speed, and in its robustness. No other comparably priced solution has the ability to recover from hard drive failure with all data intact, and with the system continuing to work. While RAID 0 is an exception, with complete storage shutdown in case of RAID hard drive failure, almost all RAID systems offer complete RAID restoration capabilities for even the most amateur of users.

RAID hard drive failure becomes a difficulty for companies in other situations, though. At Hard Drive Recovery Group, many of our RAID repair jobs come because of natural disasters such as floods or fire. In cases like this, it is usually quite likely that if one raid hard drive has failed, others are likely to have failed as well.

Our experienced RAID data recovery technicians are experienced with this kind of recover and repair, and we are equipped with the required Class 100 clean room, which ensures your data's safety.

Single RAID Drive Failure vs. RAID Failure

RAID systems are not commonly known as failure-prone storage solutions. In fact, outside of the previously mentioned RAID 0, the "Redundant" in RAID speaks to the automatic backup capabilities of the system, using parity information. The reality is, even with RAID 1, the likelihood of complete RAID hard drive failure within 3 years of installation, according to recent tests, is only 0.25%. This percentage may even be lower, in fact, because of the fact that the course of action upon the first RAID hard drive failure is typically to replace that hard disk.

Typically, the single hard drive failure merely causes degraded performance, which in percentage terms is much worse depending on the configuration (RAID 10, as an example, would have far less degradation than RAID 1, as it simply has more hard disks to work with).

RAID Catastrophe

Where RAID hard drive failure can cause catastrophic data loss is when more than one drive fails at once. This is typically quite rare, but does happen, as often larger RAID configurations such as RAID 6 or greater are often run with one failed hard disk for months before the original drive loss is noticed. RAID controller failure can also cause complete system failure, but this is quite uncommon as well. But no matter the probability of either failure, if your RAID system has encountered a failure, it is key to remember to not panic, and definitely DO NOT do anything which could compromise the data on the drives.

Hard Drive Recovery Group has specialized in RAID hard drive failure repair for well over 15 years. Our RAID data recovery experts have dealt with small SOHO RAID 0 systems all the way up to RAID 50 Microsoft Exchange Servers such as those used by Fortune 100 companies.

We safely recover data from all RAID repair jobs by imaging all disks before we attempt recoveries. This ensures that your data is locked down even before we begin. Our success rate is nearly 100% in RAID failure repair jobs, and we never charge if we cannot recover data. Don't wait. Contact us today.

Contact us here for a free RAID system repair consultation.

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