RAID 6 is one of the newest RAID technologies to be employed, and is found on more and more servers and virtual servers from large companies like Microsoft. Experts predict that, within the next decade, RAID 6 will be the most popular RAID configuration available; it already offers the highest performance, the best fault tolerance, and the greatest stability of previous RAID levels.
What’s So Great About RAID 6?

RAID 6 works in much the same way as RAID 5, with blocked data striping across any number of hard drives in the array, and distributed parity. However, parity is not only distributed across the disks in the array, it is also duplicated across the disks.

This means that a RAID 6 array can suffer the failure of two hard drives and you’ll still be able to recreate your RAID array from the existing drives.

Erasure: Preventing Unrecoverable Read Errors

RAID 6 arrays also employ a high-tech technique called erasure, which is another key to the level 6 RAID array reliability and fault tolerance. In addition to duplicated parity, RAID 6 arrays employ erasure codes. This means that, if a read error occurs in a hard disk drive, programming permits the RAID error to actually detect, by means of a code, the missing data and replicate it. This happens instantaneously from the perspective of the end-user. Your RAID 6 array could recover data and you wouldn’t even know it.

Lost data occurs all the time within hard drives and RAID arrays, but codes developed within the hard disk drives replicate the appropriate data before the user realizes it’s gone. However, as hard drives grow larger and larger, the odds of an unrecoverable read error increases. RAID 6’s sophisticated erasure technology decreases the odds, making RAID 6 the most stable of the RAID arrays. 

Need RAID 6 Data Recovery

The data recovery specialists at 24 Hour Data have been in this industry long enough to know that nothing is rock-solid. RAID 6 arrays offer the greatest protection available against unrecoverable read errors, but every hard disk drive, with time, may fail. If you’ve suffered hard disk failure in more than two disk drives in your RAID 6 array, you need professional data recovery services to avoid the loss of mission critical data.

Even if you do back-ups, and even if you believe your RAID 6 array is stable, hard drive failures happen. Trust a data recovery company that stays on the cutting edge of RAID array technology, including successful data recovery for complicated RAID 6 arrays.