What is a RAID rebuild?

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A RAID rebuild is the process of reconstructing data on a replacement disk after a disk has failed. When one drive goes down, the RAID controller uses the data from the remaining healthy drives (and the parity information if applicable) to recreate exactly what was on the failed disk, and writes that reconstructed data onto a new drive. In a mirrored setup, the data is read from the surviving copy and written to the new disk. In parity-based RAID (like RAID 5 or RAID 6), the missing data is computed from the parity and the other data stripes across the remaining disks. The goal is to restore the array to its full, fault-tolerant state, though the rebuild can take time and may temporarily impact performance, with an increased risk of another failure during the rebuild. Reinitializing after power loss, deleting the failed disk, or changing the RAID level describe different operations and are not about reconstructing data onto a replacement disk.