RAID systems are considered the safest storage where data is stored in strips to improve performance and parity to regenerate lost data. HP (Compaq), DELL, IBM, delivers some of the most popular RAID servers etc. In recent years network storage has gained popularity such as NetApps, Snap Server, buffalo tech and many more. These NAS servers have inbuilt RAID storage and is accessible from a high-speed network to all its users assigned by the administrator of the storage.

Despite having the hardware protection, these servers comprising RAID devices do fail and data loss does happen. RAID recovery is not an easy job to perform, even if you know about some of the recovery tools available in the market. Taking the drives out from the failed RAID array and attaching them to another machine maintaining the same order would be difficult for novices.

Then approach the most difficult portion of RAID recovery, which is reconstructing the RAID. There could be various causes to a RAID failure.

• RAID reinitialized accidentally by the administrator causing a new array to be formed and losing old data and configuration.
  
  
• One of the drive has failed and RAID is not coming up
  
  
• Drives going offline suddenly and not being mounted due to power surge or mishandling.
  
  
• RAID card causing RAID to fail

The most important portion in RAID recovery (specifically RAID 5) is to identify correct parity order and stripe size, and also the block size (the size of a cluster formed when we format a drive, sectors combine to form a logical unit which is know as block or cluster).

Below mentioned are some of the useful names, which might be able to help you, reconstruct RAID and thereafter you may use a cloning application to create a single volume, which can be mounted as actual RAID volume. Once the volume is mounted, recovery becomes easier.

• File Scavenger (Quetek Consulting Corporation)
• R-Studio – RAID Tools
• RAID Reconstructor – GetDataback (Runtime Software)