What should I know about my RAID Subsystem
Manufacturer's Documentation and
Technical Descriptions?

Our Answer:

Be familiar with any and all RAID subsystem manufacturer's documentation and technical descriptions, of course.  At the same time, don't rely on manufacturer technical support service help to protect your data:  their focus is on the proper functioning of their equipment and they generally assume that your data is backed up, so it's quite common that they will advise you to take some remedial action that will destroy your data contents.  Beware, even when after you ask, and they tell you there's no danger of data loss.

Also . . .  there is a considerable amount of information right here on this website.  What we offer here will be considerably easier to digest than manufacturer's information.  Occasionally we receive RAID-5 subsystems for data recovery and it turns out that all of the mission-critical data motivating recovery actions had been over-written or erased (not the same as deleted, unfortunately) before the client's hardware even began its journey to our laboratory.  In every case, the offending actions were intended as remedies, but propogated into disaster instead.  If you've gained an understanding of the information linked to at the right under "Remediation for RAID Data Storage Subsystems", such disaster can surely be averted.

Easily accessed from the "nav" menu, above in the column at right, we have diagrams of the various types of RAID configurations, which is a great way to quickly view graphical drawings depicting conventional RAID schemes of organization.  Backing this up we have more detailed narratives, describing in some detail, each of the several different levels of RAID, along with application notes.  RAID technology gives special meanings to certain terms that provide a deeper understanding and enable more precise communication of the applied concepts; get up to speed on this terminology with our glossary of common RAID expressions.  Rounding out the section is one of the most popular pages on our web domain:  our "DO's & DON'Ts page — when you're faced with real trouble — but arguably, this page is most valuable if you can absorb its content BEFORE you have trouble.