I'll admit, there's very little I know about RAID setups, so this little article helped with my understanding of the storage concept. Rick Young does a nice job of explaining what RAID is, how to came to be, and different examples of existing RAID rigs. RAID is essentially a group of hard drives linked together, acting as a single drive. If one fails, the whole system crashes. However, the benefits can be great, especially in environments where massive amounts of storage and speed is vital. Learn all about your RAID, SCSI, ATA, and SATA with this excellent feature.RAID: the lowdown
I'll admit, there's very little I know about RAID setups, so this little article helped with my understanding of the storage concept. Rick Young does a nice job of explaining what RAID is, how to came to be, and different examples of existing RAID rigs. RAID is essentially a group of hard drives linked together, acting as a single drive. If one fails, the whole system crashes. However, the benefits can be great, especially in environments where massive amounts of storage and speed is vital. Learn all about your RAID, SCSI, ATA, and SATA with this excellent feature.Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. I agree with #1. This article is very misleading to newcomers to RAID configurations. In fact, it's thoroughly inaccurate. If you're running RAID0, then yeah, a failed disk would cause the whole RAID setup to fail. And software vs. hardware configuration wouldn't differ much in RAID0.
But with RAID1 or RAID5 (or any of the other RAID configs excluding 0), "redundancy" obviously is the key. Failure of one disk doesn't cause the whole RAID system to fail. Generally, the redundancy allows you to take the failed drive out and put a new one in.
Processing speeds as well. In RAID5, the numerous XOR calculations are extremely CPU intense, and, therefore, hardware RAID cards are infinitely better than software.
Sadly, this article seems to focus on RAID0 (that or its information is only correct for RAID0), which, although is labeled RAID, is not technically a RAID configuration since there's no redundancy.
Posted at 11:45PM on Dec 17th 2006 by Anthony Nguyen
1. "If one fails, the whole system crashes."
Not necessarily true.. . This will happen if you use RAID 0, where your data is "striped" across multiple disks. With RAID 1 or RAID 5 (or a number of the others) your data is "mirrored" to minimize the risk. Thus, RAID can be very useful if you're looking for data protection or availability, in addition to providing large storage.
More info is available in the RAID Wikipedia entry.
Posted at 12:25PM on Dec 17th 2006 by Andrew Stott