RAID Storage
Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive)
Disk or RAID storage offers numerous advantages over a single drive; mainly a
higher data transfer rate and greater reliability. RAID storage is ideal for
those who want immediate availability of recovered data. With RAID storage,
redundancy can be set to the organization’s chosen level.
Although a RAID array is a multitude of independent disks, if any one of the
disks in the RAID array fails, it can be replaced without data loss and without
interruption to the process. Each RAID array is considered one drive by the host
computer.
There are 6 levels of RAID storage: RAID-0 through RAID-5. The numbers assigned
to the particular RAID storage type do not indicate a hierarchy of performance
or reliability, but rather different functionalities.
· RAID-0: -0 RAID storage offers no redundancy. When one drive in the RAID array
fails, all of the data in the RAID array is lost.
· RAID-1: This type of RAID storage provides data mirroring, meaning that data
is written on two drives in the RAID array at once. The downside to mirroring
technology is the price which can be double per storage capacity because of the
multiple drives.
· RAID-2: -2 is a unique type of RAID storage that doesn’t use standard
stripping, mirroring, or parity techniques, but something similar to striping
with parity.
· RAID-3: With -3 RAID storage, one additional drive is added to the RAID array
that will pick up slack if one of the disks fails.
· RAID-4: Uses blocks instead of bytes for stripping and provides fault
tolerance through a dedicated parity disk
· RAID-5: This type of RAID storage offers high performance and reliability
because of its high data availability.
· RAID-6: This can be thought of as "RAID 5, but more". It
stripes blocks of data and parity across an array of drives like RAID 5, except
that it calculates two sets of parity information for each parcel of
data. The goal of this duplication is solely to improve fault tolerance; RAID 6
can handle the failure of any two drives in the array while other single RAID
levels can handle at most one fault. Performance-wise, RAID 6 is generally
slightly worse than RAID 5 in terms of writes due to the added overhead of more
parity calculations, but may be slightly faster in random reads due to spreading
of data over one more disk.
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