RAID Recovery Course

RAID recovery course consists of six lessons. Each lesson comes with hands-on tasks where you are offered to solve problems of different levels – from determining a possible RAID type to getting a full array configuration for a "black box". For each lesson we developed a set of multiple choice tests to help you estimate how much you have learned about some or other RAID recovery aspect.

Lessons are arranged in order of increasing difficulty and fairly often a lesson refers to the material of the previous lesson. So we recommend you study the lessons in the order in which they are going.

In all lessons where data recovery software is needed for explanation or practice tasks, we use our ReclaiMe Pro. You can get a free trial version of ReclaiMe Pro on www.ReclaiMe-Pro.com. The trial version is enough to complete the tasks.

Also, you may find helpful to have at hand a textbook Logical Data Recovery, which formed the basis of this course.

Lesson 1 - RAID introduction

From this lesson, you learn about RAID criteria such as fault-tolerance, performance, and capacity. Additionally, we provide information about differences between block and non-block RAIDs, and about RAID configuration parameters.

Lesson 2 - RAID levels

The lesson covers both common RAID types such as RAID1 (mirror), RAID0, RAID10, RAID5, and exotic RAID levels like RAID4, various RAID6 configurations, RAID5E, RAID5EE, and RAID with delayed parity. Each RAID level is illustrated by the data layout scheme.

Lesson 3 - Content analysis

The lesson covers the first step in RAID recovery – content analysis. In this lesson, you will learn how to determine a correct RAID level by using RAID content analysis tools.

Lesson 4 - Parity analysis

From this lesson, you will learn what is parity in general, what function is used to calculate parity in RAID arrays, and how parity analysis can help you determine the correct RAID configuration.

Lesson 5 - Entropy analysis

This lesson covers what entropy is in general, how entropy analysis is applied to parity-based RAIDs such as RAID5 and RAID6, and what additional information about RAID configuration you can get with entropy analysis.

Lesson 6 - RAID recovery workflow

This is the last lesson devoted to general RAID recovery workflow covering all the aspects from inspecting of RAID array member disks in Disk Management to entropy analysis of parity-based RAIDs.