A list of questions posed to Robin England
- What is RAID and what is it used for?
- What benefits does it provide?
- Any disadvantages?
- Are they mainly for businesses or can home users benefit from it too?
- Are RAID arrays difficult to set up? Maintain?
- How do you decide when to use it? How do you know it’s the best solution for you? Are they most useful for certain setups (e.g. Hyper-V, MS Ex, SQL, etc.)
- Is there a difference in performance between a RAID 5 and 6?
- Any suggestions on best practices to configure your RAID setup?
- What happens if the RAID fails? Is data easier to recover? Why?
- So if one drive fails, is replacing it the best option? Would the data be at risk?
- What happens if more drives fail? Is there some way to prepare for/prevent this (e.g. RAID 6)?
- Any tips on what to do if a drive fails?
- Have you noticed any trends on timing/number of drives that fail?
- Many people tend to try to rebuild failed drives themselves. Any advice you can give them?
- I’ve heard mixed advice re whether RAID drives should be labelled to help reconstruct the data in case of failure. Can you clarify this?
- If data is lost, we normally tell people to turn off the equipment to prevent any potential further loss. Is this also true for RAID?
- What should they consider when deciding to try to DIY and when to seek professional help?
- Say the data has been lost. Can we restore the backup data onto the RAID system directly? Would it overwrite the missing data?
- So we lost the data. We tried a few things and nothing worked. What should we do next?
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