subject: Should you rebuild RAID 1 arrays by yourself or get help? [print this page] Should you rebuild RAID 1 arrays by yourself or get help?
Is it a good idea to rebuild RAID 1 arrays by yourself or should you consider getting help from professionals?
RAID is an acronym that stands for "redundant array of independent disks" and was designed for increased data reliability and performance. For the most part, RAID works without problems and serves its purpose well, giving an increase in performance and a general way of avoiding the loss of very important data. However, RAID is not immune to failure. And when a RAID array fails, it is possible for data loss to occur if it is not acted upon immediately.
So how does the RAID 1 operate? Well, RAID 1 is one of the more common types of RAID and needs a minimum of 2 hard disk drives to work. How it works is fairly simple: RAID 1 just takes the data from one storage drive and duplicates it onto a second storage drive. This benefit is called data redundancy and it means that if any one of the two hard drives fail for some reason, none of the data stored will be lost because all of it will be present as a duplicate on the other hard drive. As long as one of the two hard drives remains functional, data integrity will be maintained. This makes it possible to just stick in a new, working hard drive and let the RAID array rebuilt itself in the event that a failure does happen. However, Is it safe to rebuild RAID 1 arrays yourself?
Before going ahead to rebuild RAID 1 arrays yourself, you should be sure to make a correct diagnosis. This can be done by finding out what caused the failure or which one of the two hard drives isn't functioning properly. However, it is still generally a good idea to get help from professionals if you've never done any similar work by yourself or if the data on the RAID array is very important and you can't risk losing it completely.
