Raid Recovery Tips

A volume with RAID 5 is built from a minimum of three disk drives and uses data striping and parity data to provide redundancy. (Parity is extra information that is used to re-create data if a disk drive fails. In volumes with RAID 5, parity data is striped evenly across the disk drives with the stored data.) Parity data provides data protection, and striping improves performance.
The following provides the steps necessary to create a RAID 0/1/5/10/Spanned/JBOD volume. It is assumes the following:

• You have backed up any/all critical data off of the BlackArmor NAS Server.
• All previous unneeded volumes have…

RAID 0 is also commonly referred to as "striping". RAID 0 is known for speed. When data is written to the RAID 0 volume, it is written to all drives striped together at the same time. Think of each interface as a water hose and the volume as the bucket; the bucket will fill faster if multiple water hoses are filling it at the same time. The same holds true for striping – data writes faster to the volume because it is being written through more than one drive interface.
The downside to RAID 0 volumes is the fact that…

What do I need to consider when selecting drives for use in a RAID configuration? Can two different hard drives be used in a mirroring or RAID array, or must they be identical brands and models?

Hard drives for RAID. Mix hard drives in a RAID array?

Most SCSI RAID controllers will accept different kinds of hard drives. The hard drives should match in capacity points and rotational (RPM) speed. At best, all drives in an array will be identical–at the same firmware revision level.

RAID can be used with any size hard drive. The smallest capacity drive will determine the largest logical volume…

The following are the steps necessary to configure a RAID 1 (mirrored) volume on your OneTouch III Turbo 1TB drive:

Currently only the OneTouch III Turbo 1TB (Terabyte) drives provide RAID 1 (Mirrored) support. Configuring a RAID volume is a data destructive process. It is strongly recommended that you backup any/all data on your OneTouch III Turbo drive before proceeding.

1. Double-click on the Maxtor OneTouch Manager icon on your Windows Desktop. This will launch the Onetouch Manager application. If this icon has been removed from the desktop, click Start > Programs (All Program for Windows XP) > Maxtor > OneTouch > Maxtor OneTouch^™ Manager
2. Click on the Settings button.…

I don’t need the redundancy of RAID five and want more usable disk space. Can I configure the NAS 4000 Series without RAID 5?

Yes, you can the NAS 4000 Series for JBOD (just a bunch of disks), spanned, spanned and mirrored, or striped disk configurations.

I don’t need the redundancy of RAID five and want more usable disk space. Can I configure the NAS 4000 Series without RAID 5?

Yes, you can the NAS 4000 Series for JBOD (just a bunch of disks), spanned, spanned and mirrored, or striped disk configurations.

The Maxtor Onetouch III Turbo drive will be released as a 600 gigabyte (GB) RAID 0 model, and a 1 terabyte (1 TB, 1000 GB) RAID 0/1 model.  
RAID 1 can now be used with the OneTouch III Turbo 600 GB models with updated installation software.

Highlights

• User-configurable RAID solution
• Use RAID 0 for high performance disk striping or RAID 1 for automatic mirroring
• Up to 1 TB storage capacity
• FireWire® 800 for fast data transfer
• Oxford 924 chipset
• Pre-formatted for Mac; easily formatted for Windows®
• Available in RAID 0 only, and RAID 0 / RAID 1 (user configurable) configurations.

What does this mean?

Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo drives…

When you connect a WD external drive to your Mac computer, and you have the WD Drive Manager installed on it, a little blue WD icon appears in the upper right corner of your desktop. Depending on the status of your drive, or dual RAID drive, the WD icon will do different things.

1. The WD icon is also the way that you access the drive’s status, or as in this case, the drive’s RAID status. When the RAID is healthy, you will see the blue WD icon. Clicking on the WD icon opens a short menu that leads to launching the RAID Manager. From there, you…

Please Note: WD Drive Manager will appear in the System Tray only when your WD My Book external hard drive is attached to your computer. The software can be downloaded from the Downloads Library.

Examples of what it does on single WD My Book drives:

• When you mouse over the WD icon, the WD Drive Manager will show you the drive status: Drive Name, Volume Letter, Percent Used, Temperature Status. If the drive is healthy, the icon is steady and dark blue.

  

• When you right-click on the Drive Manager icon, it will allow you to safely remove the drive.

  

• Left-click on the…

Note: A RAID 0 array is not fault tolerant. It is recommended that you backup any important data that you decide to store on the array.
To create a RAID 0 array please follow the steps below:

1. With the computer powered off, follow the instructions for installing the RAID controller correctly and connect both Serial ATA hard drives to the controller.
2. Boot your computer with the controller and drives already installed.
3. Watch your boot screens for a prompt that will ask you to press the Control and F keys at the same time to enter the Fastbuild utility and press those keys to enter.
4. Press the 1 key to enter…