RAID 6 Data Recovery

Looking for RAID 6 data recovery? A RAID 6 array is just like any other storage device; it is not immune to failure and data loss and can require RAID data recovery. If you’ve lost data due to a RAID 6 array failure, our RAID recovery experts can help you. While RAID 5 is still one of the most popular RAID levels, many people are turning to RAID 6 for their data storage needs. RAID 5 has its advantages over RAID 6, but the latter offers a stronger safeguard against failure.

The RAID Data Recovery Process

RAID 6 devices may be well-protected with high fault tolerance, but no data storage device is 100% failure-proof, and you may find yourself needing data recovery when a controller fails or more than two disks fail in your RAID system. A RAID 6 array is no replacement for a secure, off-site backup of your data in the event of data loss. Fortunately, there’s no need to panic if you’ve lost data due to a RAID failure. Our RAID 6 data recovery engineers can help you.

Free RAID 6 Data Recovery Evaluation

Our RAID recovery efforts begin with a free evaluation. We send you a free inbound UPS label to cover shipping costs. After one to two business days, our data recovery engineers will have a statement of work for you. This statement of work includes a firm price quote, a probability of successful data recovery, and an estimated time to completion.

Our data recovery experts will only move forward with the RAID 6 recovery procedure if you are comfortable with our terms.

Independent Analysis of Your RAID 6 Array’s Hard Drives & Our Proprietary Data Recovery Software

Our RAID 6 recovery engineers’ first goal is to create as complete a forensic image of all the drives in your array as possible. Any necessary repairs to the failed hard drives from your crashed RAID 6 array are made in our ISO-5 certified cleanroom workbenches. Highly trained and skilled engineers in our data recovery lab carry out the repairs.

When rebuilding a RAID array, we never work with any of the original drives in the array. Our forensic imaging data recovery software is write-blocked, so we never alter any of the critical files on the original drives.

All of the hard drives in a RAID 6 array have special metadata written to them by the RAID controller. This metadata helps the RAID controller know exactly how the hard drives are arranged. Our RAID 6 data recovery experts use this metadata to make sense of the arrangement of the drives in the array. Everything from the order of the drives to the location of the parity blocks and when each drive stopped working can be discerned from this metadata.

If there are any unrecoverable portions of the drives, our RAID 6 data recovery experts work around the inaccessible data. Our goal when recovering data is data integrity; we want to provide you with as many functional and uncorrupted recovered files as possible. There is no cost, upfront or otherwise, associated with our RAID 6 data recovery process until we recover data you deem to be important. If we are unable to get your important files back, you owe us nothing.

If you would like to contact us to receive a no-pressure consultation, click the button below. This will take you to a page with our phone number and email. This page also provides you with the option to schedule an appointment with a data recovery Client Advisor at a later time or date, or chat with them online.

Click the button below if you would like to send in your device for data recovery. Sending in your device is financially risk-free. You will be asked to fill out a short form. Once you have completed the form, we will send a shipping label to the address provided. After we receive your device, we will begin a free evaluation and contact you with a firm price quote for data recovery.

Recover Data from Your Failed Raid 6: Reuniting You with Your Data

After you pay for our data recovery efforts, we extract your recovered data to a password-protected external hard drive. This hard drive is then shipped to you. You are the only party other than our customer service representatives who know the password. This keeps your data secure in the event of an error occurring during shipping. We hold onto your data for five business days after your scheduled delivery, to give you enough time to make sure nothing has gone wrong. Once that grace period is over, we erase the data from our system. We make certain that you are reunited with your data as safely and securely as possible.

How Can a RAID 6 Array Fail?

Just because a RAID 6 array has more fault tolerance, however, doesn’t make RAID 6 failure impossible. While RAID 6 failure is certainly less likely, no RAID configurations are perfectly insulated against failure and data loss. And ironically, the one thing that is meant to prolong a RAID 6 array’s life can also hasten its demise.

When a hard drive inside a RAID 5 or RAID 6 array fails, it can be replaced. The RAID controller takes the fresh drive and begins running its parity checks on the other drives. Using the parity data, the controller turns the new drive into an exact duplicate of the old one. This process is referred to as “rebuilding” the RAID array. A RAID 6 array can be rebuilt to restore data if one or two disks have failed. However, there are risks to rebuilding a RAID 6 array.

A RAID 5 or RAID 6 array is in its most vulnerable state when it is being rebuilt. The still-functional drives must pull double duty while the new drive (or drives, in the case that two drives in a RAID 6 array have failed) is being integrated into the array. They are put under much more strain than usual. This can actually cause one or more drives to fail during the rebuild process. Furthermore, the time it takes to rebuild a RAID 6 array depends on the size of the drives in the array. As hard drive capacities in your storage devices increase, rebuild time rises, dramatically increasing a RAID 6 array’s window of vulnerability.

Multiple simultaneous hard drive failures are rare, but can occur. Hard drives can fail under the stress of a RAID rebuild. A sudden power surge or loss of power can cause several drives to crash at once. If the drives in your array came off the assembly line within minutes or days of each other, they could fail within minutes or days of each other too. Natural disasters and freak accidents can cause a RAID 6 crash. And storage devices like RAID 6 arrays have no safeguards against data loss due to file deletion or reformatting.

What Is RAID 6?

RAID 6 is essentially RAID-5 taken a step further. A RAID 5 array stripes its data across multiple independent disks and includes parity data in case one disk fails. A RAID 6 array does the same thing. But then it adds two parity stripes to the redundant array, increasing drive failure tolerance. Due to its second layer of parity, RAID 6 is tolerant of up to two disk failures. It does, however, require one more hard drive than RAID 5 to hold the same amount of data, as the dual parity data take up twice as much space. Whereas a RAID 5 array with four disks would have three disks’ worth of capacity, a four-drive RAID 6 array only has two drives.

Talk to RAID 6 Data Recovery Expert Today!

Our client advisors are available by phone during business hours
(M – F: 8am – 7pm; Sat: 10am – 3pm).

1-877-624-7206 ext.1

Send us an email including the type of phone you have and the problem you are experiencing. A client advisor will respond within 25 minutes during business hours
(M – F: 8am – 7pm; Sat: 10am – 3pm).

[email protected]

Have a quick question about the data recovery process? Use our chat feature to chat with one of our client advisors (not a robot!) during business hours
(M – F: 8am – 7pm; Sat: 10am – 3pm).

Click here to chat!

Want to schedule a call for a time that is convenient for you? Click the button above to schedule a brief consultation with one of our client advisors.
Click here to schedule a call

RAID 5 and RAID 6 both use XOR, or “exclusive or,” logic to provide parity. For parity calculations, XOR logic works on the bit scale. Using the XOR function, all of the bits of one missing hard drive’s data can be reconstructed using the remaining drives. But this only works if one drive is missing. XOR logic can only go so far. Whenever more than one drive is missing, no amount of XOR parity calculations can fill in the rest of the gaps.

In a RAID 5 array with five hard drives, one out of every five blocks contains only parity data. The parity blocks are spread out across the drives to increase efficiency. In a RAID 6 array with the same number of drives, two out of every five blocks contain parity data. The extra parity blocks in a RAID 6 array don’t rely on XOR coding. Instead, they use Reed-Solomon error correction codes.

RAID-6 Parity
One of the possible ways XOR and Reed-Solomon parity blocks can be distributed throughout a RAID-6 array