Many tend to choose redundant array of independent disks (RAID) as their data storage method. But the daily maintenance of RAID is not that easy. Don’t worry. Here are 5 useful tricks for you to prevent common RAID failures.
Redundant array of independent disks (RAID) is a popular data storage technology which is chosen by plenty of people and enterprises. After setting up RAID, another important work is daily maintenance. This is a vital job that has a great impact on the security of data storage. No matter you have paid much attention to it or not before, you have to take proper actions from now on.
1.Prepare battery for writing cache
Many RAID controllers use caches to improve its performance. If power failures occur when it is writing/reading caches, you probably will come across data corruptions. Thus if you figure out that your RAID uses caches, you’d better prepare power backups for it in case of power failures.
2.Consistency checks
Many might hold a misconception of “RAID failures will not happen frequently” or “failures are obvious for people to discover”. That’s totally wrong. Thus you should build a regular manner to check whether the RAID is working normally or not. Besides, you can also apply disk monitoring technologies to verify the disk periodically.
3.Use drives from different trays when setting up RAID volumes
Generally, trays of drives in the array come from the same manufacturing line with sequential numbers. If you set up RAID across a set of subsequently numbered drives, the RAID volumes will get compromised easily. And if the problem is caused by manufacturing defects, then every drive on the line will suffer corruptions during a typical production cycle.
4.Don’t force “nearing failed/failed” drives back into operation
Although many say that “sometimes, so-called failed drives are actually have no problems after the Detection by manufacturer”, you cannot take the chance to force the drive back into the system and keep working as usual. Otherwise, drive failures will probably occur for second or third times. And this will definitely cause big trouble in recovery work.
5.Don’t rebuild a system readily
Many drives offer the “hot plug” to help people replace failed drives without shutting off the system or interrupting the business. But RAID rebuild is usually time-consuming. If any problems happen during the process, it will leave the data in danger immediately. Therefore, only if you have data backups, can you try a RAID rebuild when too many drives have corrupted.
6.Prepare backups
From foresaid tips, you can know that backup is definitely in need. And do not take the RAID as your backups. No matter data disasters occur or not, you should keep regular data backups. Thus when encountering data corruption like Outlook corruption, you can resort to both RAID and backups.
Author Introduction:
Allissa Shen is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including sql fix and word recovery software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com
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