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Forum Discussion

pplive's avatar
pplive
Follower
Jan 19, 2012

Are raid 5 hard drives inter dependent on each other?

I'm thinking of buying a Netgear ReadyNAS.
In Raid 5, if I pull one of the hard drives, will the data be available in that hard drive or are the hard drives are dependent on each other?

1 Reply

  • mdgm-ntgr's avatar
    mdgm-ntgr
    NETGEAR Employee Retired
    Yes they are dependant.

    I think you are thinking about things the wrong way. RAID provides redundancy or high availability not backup. If important data is primarily stored on a ReadyNAS it must be backed up e.g. to a USB disk, another NAS, the cloud, or some place else.

    With RAID-5 if you have X disks you X-1 disks to be able to recover your data.

    Have a read of Preventing Catastrophic Data Loss.

    RAID is good but it is no replacement for a backup.

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