RAID 5 Woes (and resolution)
So we had a client that has a server that is using a motherboard (fakeraid) for their raid management. I have nothing against RAID, but I really feel like people should use a real RAID controller (3ware or areka) when they are going to be using RAID in a production environment for a business. Anyways, apparently 2 drives got flagged as bad at the same time in a 3 drive RAID 5. That is bad, very bad. In most cases, this would result in major data loss. I found a tool that miraculously saved the day though. Runtime.org has a RAID recovery bundle that we used that worked like a charm. I had used their DriveImageXML and such before and wanted to give their tool a shot. It cost us over $150 but within 6 hours we had spliced the 3 RAID drives together into one larger drive and we have their server back up and running as if nothing had happened. We’ll be moving them to a true RAID controller soon, but until then, we know what tool we’ll be using for them and other similar cases. I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for this application, it would have taken much longer and much more money to get their information back to them.
As a side note: have you audited your backups recently?
2 comments
Amen to checking your back ups. I too was impressed with how that application worked for us. It really did save the day. And dare I mention one more time, something about making sure you have backups?
Definitely agree on the whole fakeraid thing, running a hardware-supported raid is not even slow in terms of performance and data throughput it’s even more worse when it’s crashing. Areca, Adaptec, 3ware and all the others FTW!
Anyways, good job Joseph!