Can I use my phone’s SD card for RAID 5, and would it protect damaged videos?
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MellowCedar42
Years ago, I downloaded several videos that have since become corrupted, and the originals are no longer available online. I'm wondering whether it's possible to partition a phone's SD card for RAID 5 or another redundant setup, and whether that kind of arrangement could have prevented the files from becoming corrupted. I'd also appreciate any general advice for figuring out whether the videos can be repaired or recovered.
Answers
RAID is mainly designed to keep data available when a drive fails; it isn’t a substitute for backups and won’t necessarily protect against corrupted files. If bad data gets written across the array, the redundant copies or parity may preserve the same bad data. For the videos, first determine what “corrupted” means—whether the files are unreadable, truncated, missing metadata, or affected by storage errors. Recovery or repair may be possible for minor container or metadata problems, but a seriously damaged file may not be recoverable. Keeping multiple independent backups would be more useful than trying to build RAID on a phone.
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A phone generally can’t do a RAID 5 setup because RAID 5 needs at least three separate, similarly sized drives. A single SD card can be partitioned, but its partitions are still on the same physical storage, so that would not provide meaningful redundancy. Most phones also don’t have multiple SD card slots or a dedicated RAID controller. Software RAID exists in some systems, but using it on a phone would be impractical and could add significant processing and battery costs.
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MellowCedar42: Would RAID 5 have protected the videos from corruption in the first place, assuming I had a suitable multi-drive setup?