This is a cautionary tale about how many businesses maintain years and years of data storage. They’ve maintained servers and stored them on disks using RAID 5 technology. It’s a reliable system, but when you need to retrieve data, it can present a lot of costly complexities, as one of our clients recently discovered.

Our client was having trouble retrieving data and asked us to take a look. They gave us a half-dozen or so drives, and our immediate problem was that we couldn’t just pop them into a machine and take a look.

The problem was that our client had a server configured for RAID 5. In technical terms, RAID 5 is a configuration – redundant array of independent disks – that utilizes disk striping with parity. It enables you to distribute data across multiple drives with a parity check. This ensures data integrity even if one drive fails, and the configuration makes fast data retrieval possible.

However, it requires a minimum of three drives to function properly, and you need detailed record keeping to retrieve your data. That’s where the problem comes in. You need to take a Sharpie and identify each RAID 5 drive you have from the oldest to the newest. If you can’t view them in their proper sequence, you can’t retrieve your data.

If you have data on RAID 5 disks, you should consult an IT pro to see if you can dump your data to an external drive. However, it won’t be cheap. The cost can be $250 to $500 per disk to copy data to an external drive. The more disks you have, the harder it can be – unless you absolutely have them in the right sequence. And the process can be more difficult – if not impossible – if a disk is inadvertently fouled.

A better choice is RAID 1, commonly referred to as disk mirroring. Hard disks are kept in sync with one another so that if a disk were to fail, an exact copy remains, ensuring no loss.

In the event of a drive failure, recovery is easy since the duplicate drive can take over immediately. Read performance can be enhanced as data can be read from multiple disks simultaneously. The major drawback is that storage capacity is diminished, which means you’ll need more disks. In our opinion, that could outweigh the drawbacks of RAID 5, which requires more time and resources to rebuild data after a drive failure and can have slower write operations because of the need to update parity information.

We can help you determine which storage need is better for you or help you organize RAID 5 disks for more efficient data retrieval. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to discuss what’s better for you.