Single-Level RAID 1 (Mirror) Data Recovery Services

RAID Setup and Data Recovery Tips from Gillware's CEO, Brian Gill

To assist in setting up your RAID-5 correctly and to help when you need RAID data recovery, Brian has written a couple of great guides.

RAID-5 General Setup Tips from a Data Recovery Expert (pdf)

RAID-5 Failure Common Sense Tips (pdf)

Want to know more? Visit Brian's blog or connect with him on LinkedIn

Single level RAID 1 is the simplest RAID configuration requiring just two disks of equal size. When data is written to a RAID 1 array, it is written to one disk and simultaneously copied or "mirrored" to a redundant disk. If one drive of a RAID 1 array fails, the system will continue to operate using the redundant disk.

Raid 1 arrays are built for security. Instead of writing data to 1 disk, RAID 1 arrays write the same data to two disks. The following is a simple example illustrating how RAID 1 works.

Say we have a text file that consists of four characters "ABCD" and a RAID 1 array of two disks.

Here's a data representation of our text file:

Text in file

Text in file	A		B		C		D
ASCII code	4	1	4	2	4	3	4	4
Raw binary data	0 1 0 0	0 0 0 1	0 1 0 0	0 0 1 0	0 1 0 0	0 0 1 1	0 1 0 0	0 1 0 0

Here's what happens when we save the file:

The data written to disk 1 is copied to disk 2. The on one disk is a mirror of the other.

	DISK 1	DISK 2
A	0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1	0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
B	0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0	0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0
C	0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1	0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1
D	0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0	0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0

As you can see, a RAID 1 system is very simple. Recovering data from a simple RAID 1 system is exactly the same as recovering data from a single disk.

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Continue reading about RAID Arrays at one of our informational pages listed below.

RAID Setup and Data Recovery Tips from Gillware's CEO, Brian Gill

To assist in setting up your RAID-5 correctly and to help when you need RAID data recovery, Brian has written a couple of great guides.

RAID-5 General Setup Tips from a Data Recovery Expert (pdf)

RAID-5 Failure Common Sense Tips (pdf)

Want to know more? Visit Brian's blog or connect with him on LinkedIn