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RAID failures explained

The theory behind the error correction in RAID assumes that failures of drives are independent. In practice, the drives are often the same age, with similar wear. Many RAID failures are due to mechanical issues which are more likely on older drives, so the chances of a second drive failure after the first, are higher than thought. Where two drives fail, this will result in data loss. Most hard drives have a quoted service life of five years.

However, users should be aware that drives are built to different levels of robustness, depending on their intended application. Enterprise-class fibre-channel and SAS drives are generally designed to withstand the heavy use in an array, but desktop-class drives are far less robust and being used in an array could shorten their life significantly. While RAID may protect against drive failure, the data is still exposed to operator, software, hardware and virus destruction.

Although RAID recovery is one of the most technically challenging types of data recovery, we are able to provide unmatched resources to make sure we can cover all the mainstream Raid levels. We also support proprietary RAID systems and have extensive experience with MAC, UNIX, FAT and VMware Raids.

The use of Virtual Machines (VM) or Virtual Machine File Systems (VMFS) has become more popular in today's enterprise world. Virtualisation is being adopted by IT professionals, businesses and organizations to divide one physical server into multiple, isolated virtual environments. Running multiple Virtual Machines on one physical server enables an efficient utilization of computer or server hardware and it is much more cost effective.

Many Data Centers also turn to Server Virtualisation and Server consolidation to reduce costs, energy consumption and space.

Virtual Machines, however, are vulnerable to much of the same issues that affecting physical machines and data loss situations are prevalent in Virtual Machines and often are even more destructive considering the consolidation of valuable data on one physical system. Calculating data parameters are complicated by the virtual file system. Our Virtual Machine Recovery Specialists can recover data from any Virtual Machine available today including VMware, Citrix / Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle VM, Virtual Box and more.