Joseph Brower

irc: josephnexus

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?

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