When it comes to data backups, many businesses rely on the RAID 5. The reason why it is so popular is because with RAID 5, data recovery is a lot easier. So what is RAID 5 anyway? A brief RAID 5 definition can describe the hard drives as striping with parity. Basically, with the RAID level 5, it sort of combines the properties of a RAID 1 with a RAID 0.
With this set-up, you need at least three RAID 5 drives. This is so you could essentially use two of the drives to reconstruct the data in a third one if you were on a RAID 5 recovery mission. The great thing about a RAID 5 set-up is that it is easy to fix if there is a hard drive failure. In fact, others can continue to do work while the bad disk drive is taken out and replaced! You could DIY a mega server with RAID 5 all on your own, as long as you knew what you were doing.
Some of the maintenance you might have to accomplish with this RAID is defragmenting the disk drives. You can get defrag software for RAID 5 drives off the internet or through your RAID vendor. Picture all the files on your RAID 5 drives as being in file cabinets. After a while, resources are low and instead of putting the file back to cabinet three, it gets put in cabinet one. This eventually hogs resources because your computer is trying to find those files back in their original place. Defragging is what you do to straighten those files up again and restore some of those lagging resources.
When it comes to back-ups, you can also clone RAID 5 drives. Depending on how you do this, you may notice that your RAID 5 stripe size is different on each hard drive. With cloning, you are essentially duplicating a hard drive. Some of the things you will want on your system to accomplish data backup and recovery is the Sata RAID 5 controller. It will help speed things along.
If you every receive a RAID 5 failure notification, chances are that you will have to determine which disk drive is causing the problem so that you can fix it or replace it. Now before you start with the work, just note that your operating system will play a huge part in how the RAID 5 is fixed. For instance, if your Macintosh RAID 5 software fails, you will react differently if it you had received your Red Hat RAID 5 failure notifications. Each system is different; therefore it stands to reason that each computer system or network will react different with one RAID or another.