Difficulty in recovering data from RAID 5 volume
In today’s world, computers are an integral part of any business, be it the Fortune 500, large corporations, or even small and medium-sized businesses. All businesses depend so much on computers and laptops for their daily activities that this dependence on the computer makes their digital information, that is, data, so important that no one can think of losing it. Therefore, the need arises to make backup copies and have a disaster recovery plan, which can be used in case of catastrophes.
There are many technologies available in the market to choose from that will help you to successfully recover from any data loss in any disaster. One of the many plans to combat the disaster is to have RAID 5 (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). RAID 5 can be hardware or software based. You must have at least three hard drives of the same capacity to form a RAID 5 volume.
The advantages of having a RAID 5 volume are its fault tolerance and its read and write efficiency. Here you have, for example, 12MB of files to be written to the RAID 5 volume, 6MB + 6MB will be simultaneously written to any two hard drives, and 6MB of additional parity information will be written to the third hard drive. As clearly as described above, the downside is the reduction in data storage capacity, 33.333% to be exact.
Fault tolerance is only when one drive fails, but if more than one drive in the RAID 5 volume fails, you are in big trouble. RAID 5 stores all your files equally on different disks, making recovery very difficult in the event that more than one drive fails or develops bad sectors. Software-based recovery is only possible when faulty hard drives respond to basic disk commands. It is highly recommended to create images of your disk and correctly label them from their matrix sequence in case you send them by courier to any data recovery service company. This way, you can be sure that your data is safe in case you lose the original drives in transit.
If you decide to recover the data yourself, you must have a silly SCSI controller for your SAS drive so that you can connect each of the disks one by one to create your images. Once the images are ready, you can buy any RAID recovery software that has the option to use image files and thus rebuild the RAID volume from them. There you need to specify many parameters like start sector, driving order, block size, and direction of rotation.
If you care about your data and it is of any importance to you, please do not take the “I DO MYSELF” approach and seek immediate professional help as data recovery from RAID 5 volume is very complicated and requires experience in RAID 5 Recovery .