As the costs of RAID drives drop even lower and storage capacities for hard disk drives exceed 1 TB, more and more small businesses and home users are incorporating RAID arrays into their data storage methods. RAID arrays can be used as home media servers, to expand storage capabilities across a home or a small business network, and to boost performance while enhancing the security of data stored on the server.

The top choice for many home and professional users is a RAID 5 array, which typically employs a controller for even better performance.

While most RAID levels provide either greater storage capacity, or enhanced security and better performance, a RAID 5 array offers greater storage capacity with storage striped across four or more disk drives, along with decent speed and data protection. 

RAID 5 is not as secure as RAID 1, which employs mirroring for redundancy, or as fast as RAID 0, but it offers enough of each that it is one of the most popular levels of RAID. 

A RAID 5 server can use three, four or five hard disk drives for data storage and parity. Parity is the means by which a RAID 5 array duplicates data so that if one hard disk in the array fails, the rest of the array can carry on without problems.

However, it’s always smart to swap out a failed drive and to watch the other drives in your RAID array carefully after one fail. Drives only operate for a certain number of read/write cycles. When one drive fails, others usually follow. If more than one drive in your RAID 5 array fails, you’ll need emergency data recovery services to recover lost data.

24 Hour Data has experts in all levels of RAID recovery on staff to provide you with a free diagnostic within 24 hours and excellent chances at full data recovery.