Data recovery | Hard Disk Repair

RAID systems support different types of configurations such as 0, 1, 4, 5 and linear. They have the following characteristics:

Level 0 – This level is also known as “striping” because the information saved in the hard drive is split evenly across two or more disks. The storage capacity is the same as of one hard drive, and the failure of one hard drive will result in data loss.

Level 1 - This level is best known as “mirroring”. In this case, the system duplicates and stores the information in more that one disk. Therefore, it is still possible to recover the files in the event that one disc failed completely. RAID 1 writes identical information in each disk of the unit; thus, keeping several copies that can help retrieve the data.

Level 4 – This system confines all parity data to a single disk. The storage capacity on this level equals the total capacity of all drives minus the capacity of one.

Level 5 – This is the most popular and widely used system because it distributes the tables among all the drives in the unit. It also solves the bottleneck issue . The only botleneck would be the process in which the tables are calculated. The storage capacity on this level equals the total capacity of all drives minus one.

Linear RAID – This system is composed of a group of hard drives of equal or different capacities to create a virtually bigger unit. The information is stored in sequential order on the next drive once the prior has been filled. Unfortunately, the reliability factor of this system is rather sparse. If one of the hard drives fails, the other drives can not be used as a back up to retrieve the information. The capacity equals the total capacity of all the hard drives as a group.