raid 0 question

so if one hd dies do you just have to reformat the others? or does it cause all of your hard drives to break?

If one drive dies, the other drives are still healthy. You will have to reformat in order to use them again though, as the data is striped and all of the information will be gone (virtually).

thanks, raid here i come

actually, in raid 0 even though parts of the data will be gone your computer will still be able to show all of the data, because your computer will do computations to know what is supposed to be on the second drive so if one drive fails you will know because it will run very slow because of the other computations it has to do to get the data that is missing.

Welcome to the forums honhon!

While you are speaking of something that is possible, that is not correct, as RAID0 cannot rebuild data when one drive dies... They are all gone. Other RAID levels offer the sort of protection which you are kind of speaking towards.

This is because in RAID 0, essential system files would be striped along all drives, and without one drive worth of stripe fragments, the disks would not be accessible.

Now if one wanted to recover certain files, which happened to be small enough, from a dead RAID 0 array, it could be possible, but only through extenuated means AFAIK. In no way though would the array be operational without reconstructing it from scratch. I would venture that the majority of data would be a complete loss (depending on the number of disks in the array) except through very extreme means of recovery.

I don't know if you've checked out any stickies here, but they are full of really good information, and the sticky in this storage forum about RAID levels might be of interest.

hey imog, i am in network + right now and thats what i learned, but in network + they are mainly only talkin about like word files and such, not really big files, so thats where i got my answer from. sorry for any confussion lol

I've had raid 0 arrays fail. Just depends on HOW it fails as to data recovery. I had one drive get a bad sector right where the operating system was sitting. This prevent it from booting up. The rest of the drive was fine though. So I could boot from another hard drive and copy all the information from the raid array that was still intact. Now, some stuff was still borked, but I would say I had a good 70% recovery of most of the drive's data.

The most damage that can happen is a loss of an equal amount of data on the other drive. This would be a likely occurence in the condition such as a power interruption, where the write process may be interrupted mid-stride.

Data loss is often listed arbitrarily as 100% with RAID 0 because it is virtually impossible to recover the data from one half of a mirror when the other half is totally destroyed (unless you spend $$$ for a service like Ontrack). Total destruction is not likely though, unless you deliberately smash one half of your array with a baseball bat. In most cases, you'll have all of one drive intact, and 99% of the other one intact, meaning that 98% of your data will still be recoverable, in theory.

100% is an incorrect number technically, but realistically it will hold true for most people who don't keep backups religiously or aren't keen on spending the money on a custom recovery job.

honhon - I believe you're talking about RAID 5. In RAID 0 the computer can't do computations to locate the missing data because the equation isn't complete. RAID 0 does 1+1=2 to create data. The data (2) is a result of the data stored (the 1's) on the two drives. If you lose one drive the equation turns into 1+?=? and the final data can't be accessed.

RAID 5 stores parity information on the other drives so that the "2" in the first equation isn't just generated, it's stored. If one drive fails in a 3 or more disk RAID 5 array you're left with 1+?=2, and ? can be computed (1, obviously) and the drive is rebuilt.

I think you're talking about RAID 5, not RAID 0. I'm pretty sure that example is correct, at least on a very basic level.