RAID is the technology better known as Redundant Array of Independent Disks that provides facility for redundancy. RAID technology works on a comb of multiple disks as a single logical unit. There are multiple levels of RAID used with different technologies.

RAID 0 is for block level without parity, RAID 1 for mirroring without parity, RAID 2 for bit level striping with hammering parity RAID 3 byte level striping, RAID 4 for block level striping with distributed parity & RAID 6 is with double distributed parity. If data is lost you can always use Raid 5 Data Recovery services or Raid Recovery Services.

Let’s ponder more about one of the most popular RAID level, RAID 5. RAID 5 strips data using multiple disks so if a disk fails in the system RAID continues working. Later failed disk can be replaced with a new one and smooth function can be achieved without any stoppage or interruption in business. RAID 5 offers cost effective method of DATA recovery and offers very high performance. Looking at the current demand of business data availability due to global business data protection and recovery is a crucial issue and every giant company deputes special force and infrastructure for data protection and redundancy.

In a RAID 5 configuration, when data is written on the disk, distributed parity block is created with data and requires one disk to operate upon at a particular time of period. Each block is distributed on different sector of the disks and each sector is known as a stripe. Any malfunction with any of the array of disks can not interrupt data flow. If any of the disks in array fails, next data can be calculated from this distributed parity and bypass the failed disk. A slight performance issue may occur due to single disk failure until the damaged drive is replaced. Once the drive is replaced, distributed block parity is used to recover the contents of the damaged disk drive and rewrites on new inserted disk. Minimum requirement for RAID 5 is 3 disks drives for data to be written across. These 3 disks are preferred to be of same capacity but not mandatory. Array capacity should be (size of smallest disk drive * number of disk drives -1).

There are two types of RAID 5, Hardware RAID 5 and Software RAID 5. Hardware RAID 5 contains a physical unit mounted either on mother board or external card to write data on the disks and software RAID 5, a standard drive controller and software are used to manage recovery function.

Limitation of RAID 5 is that it can handle only single disk failure and you will require software to treat entire individual disk as a single array unit. For a less knowledgeable end user special software is required to provide parity parameters, rotation and strip size. Writing performance is a bit slower than RAID 0 & RAID 1.

Benefits of RAID 5 are that RAID 5 is more cost effective comparing RAID 3 and 4 and having good fault tolerance performance. Random read performance is also excellent, and especially for larger stripe sizes. Moreover, during normal reads parity information is not required until and unless a drive fails. Data access is faster comparing to earlier levels of RAID. RAID 5 offers excellent performance for transaction oriented networks especially for multiple read/write functions. RAID 5 manages fault tolerance by ensuring that the parity information for any given block of data is written on a disk drive other than usual storage. Best performance can be adjusted by varying strip size according to the application for which data storage is used.

Being in competitive and neck to neck business competition, data storage and recovery has very important role to play in business and crucial business can not afford data loss or delay in data recovery or access. RAID 5 offers best services in such situations. You can find numerous Raid Specialists that can help if something goes wrong for you.