RAID 5 Data Recovery

We provide RAID recovery solutions for any configuration of RAID arrays. Our technical ability to retrieve data from failed RAID servers and RAID 5 arrays is amongst the highest in the data recovery industry.

RAID 5 uses striping with rotating or distributed parity. Data is striped across a minimum of three hard drives and RAID 5 parity is distributed across these drives. RAID 5 provides redundancy, therefore should a single drive fail, data on the failed drive can be rebuilt from the remaining working drives, but the failure of more than one hard drive in the array results in loss of access to the entire array.

Over the years we have recovered many terabytes of data from a large number of RAID 5 arrays. These include both software RAID and hardware RAID setup. Whatever the cause of your RAID 5 failure, software or hardware, natural or accidental we can retrieve your data.

RAID Server Crash
RAID Controller Failure
RAID 5 Disk Failure
RAID 5 Partition Recovery
RAID 5 Array failure
RAID 5 Volume Offline
RAID 5 Recovery

Win 2000, NT Server
Netware File server
UNIX & Linux Server
DELL Storage server
HP Compaq Server
IBM Storage Server
NAS & SAN Systems

RAID 5 Data Loss

RAID 5 arrays can be implemented through software, where the operating system provides the underlying RAID 5 parity and data distribution or through hardware where a dedicated RAID controller provides the RAID 5 configuration. RAID 5 speed provides efficient use of RAID storage with the added benefit of redundancy, since the failure of one drive in the array will still allow the RAID 5 volumes to be accessible, though in degraded form, whilst the parity data enables the failed drives data to be rebuilt, offering reliability and good RAID performance.

Whether you have a software RAID 5 array or a hardware RAID 5 array, RAID 5 arrays can still fail preventing access to any configured volumes in the array. RAID 5 failure can happen if the RAID array becomes damaged due to underlying software corruption to either the striping or parity data or if the hardware RAID controller fails or if more than one drive in the array fails due to a hard disk crash damaging the RAID setup and causing data loss. This can affect any type of RAID storage, including IDE RAID, SATA RAID and SCSI RAID disks.

Since RAID 5 provides redundancy and is fault tolerant, the possibility of data loss due to disk failure is much less. However when RAID 5 arrays fail it is important to isolate the problem without making any changes to the drives or their ordering in the array. Whilst some basic testing is necessary to establish the problem, multiple RAID 5 disk failure, failed rebuild attempts and any corruption to the RAID configuration can lead to data loss.

Advanced RAID Recovery

DiskEng RAID recovery expertise is based on our hard disk recovery and software recovery capabilities. Our strict engineering procedures ensure when handling RAID 5 arrays and RAID 5 parity data, each disk in the array undergoes hardware testing and is then put through an advanced disk imaging process, using specialist equipment and proprietary imaging software. This produces forensically sound raw data copy of each disk onto one of our dedicated 12TB RAID servers as a collection of disk images ready for software RAID recovery.

Our data recovery specialist engineers use a combination of raw data analysis and RAID data pattern recognition to confirm the RAID stripe size and RAID parity ordering. Using advanced RAID recovery software solutions we then emulate the disk images as "virtual disks" from which a virtual RAID 5 array is created, with critical data striping and parity data being generated on-the-fly through proprietary software. From this virtual array all configured volumes and stored user data files are located and recovered onto new disk storage media.

This level of technical ability allows us to retrieve RAID 5 data files quickly and efficiently from many serious RAID storage failures. We can retrieve critical data files by reverse engineering complex problems that affect the RAID 5 partition, RAID 5 volumes and RAID 5 parity data and many other common causes of data loss. If you encounter a RAID 5 failure, don't panic, safely power down the RAID storage system and contact us anytime, 24x7 365 days a year, for expert RAID recovery advice and emergency data recovery solutions.