• Restorer Ultimate Documentation

RAID 6 Reed-Solomon Presets


(Available on Restorer Ultimate PRO and Restorer Ultimate PRO Network only)

Restorer Ultimate allows you to create and process RAID 6 layouts. You may use either presets for several RAID 6 layouts, or use your own custom ones.

Restorer Ultimate provides presets for the following RAID 6 layouts:

Reed-Solomon

Left Synchronous (standard),

Left Asynchronous (continuous),

Right Synchronous

Right Asynchronous

Creating a RAID 6 Reed-Solomon object from a preset:

We will use the Reed-Solomon ( Left Synchronous (standard) ) preset as an example. The RAID components are the images img1.bin, img2.bin, img3.bin, img4.bin, and img5.bin on the Device/Disk list.

To create a RAID 6 Reed-Solomon object

1 Click Create Virtual RAID on the Task List
> A Create Virtual RAID wizard will appear to guide you through the process of creating a RAID or Virtual volume set.
2 Select Virtual Block RAID Volume from the Create Virtual RAID dialog box then click the Next button
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Create Virtual RAID dialog box

3 Select the required drives from the Available disks list to the Selected disks list
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Create Virtual RAID dialog box

Click to expand/collapse RAID options

Note: Components should be placed in the same order and the offsets should be specified as they were in the original volume set. If this order is incorrect, you must change it by using the Move Up and Move Down buttons.

If a component from the objects is absent (due to hardware failure, for example), you can add a "missing disk" to re-construct the RAID. The missing disk should be placed in the same order as in the original RAID structure.

Turning Disks On-Line and Off-Line on-the-fly

You may turn the objects in the virtual RAID or volume set on-line and off-line by selecting/clearing the On checkbox on the Create Virtual RAID dialog box . It may be useful, for example, if you need to see which disk is non-actual in a RAID5 or 6.

Actually, when you turn an object off-line, Restorer Ultimate substitutes it with a Missing Disk or Empty Space object.

Note: Restorer Ultimate does not write anything real on the disk. A missing disk is a virtual object that does not affect actual data on the drive.

2 Select RAID 6/Reed-Solomon on the RAID type
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Create Virtual RAID dialog box

Specify Blocks order ( Left Synchronous (standard) for our case ) for the virtual RAID 6. You may select it on the Blocks order drop-down menu. Also the RAID block size and Offset (in sectors) parameters must be set.

If the those parameters are not correct, data on the parents will not be damaged, but they cannot be recovered.

You may automatically find parameters for RAID 5 and 6. See the Finding RAID Parameters help page for details.

> The created RAID5 object can now be processed like regular drives/volumes

If Restorer Ultimate detects a valid file system on this RAID object, a partition object will appear on the Device/Disk list.

Note: You may check how correctly you have reconstructed the original volume set or RAID. Find a file and preview it. If the file appears correct, you have created a correct RAID layout. The file should be large enough. For example, it should have size equal or larger to Block size*(Number of disks-Number of parity disks) for RAID 5 or 6.

The Description Files for RAID Configurations topic shows the RAID description file for this RAID configuration.