RAID: Not Such a Clever Idea for Your Home PC - Protection and Recovery
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In a nuclear attack the accepted advice is to crawl under a table, stick your head between your knees, and kiss your ass goodbye. Slightly more helpful for RAID problems are these guidelines:
Right at the start and before installing the operating system it is worth playing around with the RAID BIOS, creating, deleting and rebuilding arrays. Different makes of RAID BIOSes have different setup screens. It pays to be very familiar with these screens and their options - including with allocating disks to arrays, and repairing arrays. Not to forget getting in and out of the RAID BIOS setup screen. Make notes of these screens, take screenshots, and keep them handy. When disaster strikes the last thing you'll want is uncertainty about a certain option. "What happens if I hit this key?" is a question you want to know the answer to before the problem occurs.
NOTE Trying to recover from a RAID problem is not for the faint hearted. Just one or two wrong keystrokes could cause complete data loss. Any user attempts at data recovery can cause further damage to the data on the drive/s and reduce the chances of a third party data recovery expert being able to help. So be careful.
At the first signs of a problem, analyze the situation prior to doing anything drastic like re-building/repairing the RAID array, reallocating disks to the array or deleting the array and re-creating it. Is one of the hard disks dead? Or is it just a matter of a cable getting loose/faulty power connector? After external issues like connections and cables have been excluded the next step would be to enter the RAID BIOS. For onboard RAID controllers the motherboard usually provides instructions on accessing the RAID BIOS; often instructions like "Press Control + F to enter RAID BIOS" flash past the screen during POST.
Controller faults: If the controller has died the chances are that none of the data on the drive has been affected. Replacing the controller should allow for complete recovery of all data.
If the array has been lost it is still usually possible to recover all the data provided the steps of creating the original array are followed meticulously, especially with regards to choosing the RAID type and allocating the drives to the array.
RAID arrays are sensitive beasts. RAID was designed for a server environment where any software that is installed on the system is A) generally server grade software and validated for use on that configuration and B) installed by professional IT personnel. RAID is not tolerant of user error, and it is far from tolerant enough to take the kind of software/game/freeware/pirated software abuse hurled at the average home PC.
What about Intel's ICH6R Southbridge with its new Matrix RAID combining RAID 0 and RAID 1 in a two disk array? It's a great idea and initial impressions are good but as it's a relatively new technology we'll have to wait to see how users get on with it. What about using RAID 0+1 or RAID 1+0 (despite the apparent similarities they are not the same thing at all)? Or RAID 2 with its funny hamming? Or RAID 5 with its parity disk? These solutions dig deeper and deeper into enterprise territory so they're fodder for another day.
References
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