Data recovery

by admin May 23, 2011 at 1:13 pm

Many businesses have an extensive IT footprint. Some businesses may have thousands of hard drives when individuals consider hard drives that are installed in servers, workstation computers, offsite backups and external hard drives that are used to transport data. Even with an excellent IT department that takes steps to ensure hard drives are maintained, data loss can and will occur. Many individuals have to go through data recovery without any clue of how the process works or whether it will be a success.

Data recovery often must occur on server hard drives or on a system that uses RAID technology. RAID technology is used by many companies in server arrays and data centers to quickly store data across multiple hard drives. When data is stored across multiple hard drives, it can be accessed more quickly. This helps to improve system performance as well as productivity for large corporations and businesses who have extremely large data sets. However, problems can occur when companies have a hard drive that either becomes physically corrupted or experiences software problems. A hard drive that is unable to operate in a RAID array may need to be repaired or replaced depending upon the type of RAID array the hard drive is within.

Data recovery from RAID depends upon the type of RAID installation used as well as whether the installation is hot swappable. A hot swappable RAID 5 installation can have a hard drive removed and replaced. The data is then rebuilt onto the new hard drive. However, the entire system may slow down due to the process of rebuilding the data from the other hard drives in the array. RAID 5 data recovery also depends upon parity write. The parity write is an error correction between hard drive and the stripes of data on other hard drives. For example, one hard drive may contain a portion of one file while another hard drive in the array contains other information. The RAID 5 array will then determine the missing portion of the parity write in order to recover the data automatically. RAID data recovery can be difficult when the data has been corrupted on multiple hard drives or there is more than a simple problem occurring within the installation. Individuals who do not know what they are doing should contact a professional RAID data recovery company in order to ensure that their data can be recovered from their hard drive.