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What is raid storage array?Raid storage array offers you a great advantage to access reliability, greater capacity and speed, using the newest technology. The term RAID is the acronym of Redundant Array of Individual Drives, as well as Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives. When you want to store significant or large files, the most essential features you should look out for the files servers are capacity, security and efficiency. You can also find RAID like an option in more modern personal computer, especially if you buy a system designed for audio and video editing. Even if you have backup, the last data you are processing, at the moment, will be lost, if your hard drives experience failure. Through RAID storage array you can have greater capacities and protect your data from disk failure. For the system you won’t need to pay high price since it uses standard hard drives. RAID refers to a system consisting of multiple hard drives put in parallel sequence. Your operating system, Linux or Windows XP…will see only one drive instead of diverse drives. The RAID system controller (the host adapter) is between one higher stream (on the computer side) and several lower rate data streams (on the hard drive side). As your computer writes to the disks, the host adapter divides the high stream data into streams – one for each of the disks. The name of this core process is “Striping”. When reading the data the controller combines your data stream from each disk and forwards it to your computer. Redundancy is the heart of the system’s effectiveness. Depending on the capacity of your hard drive, the level of data protection and integrity, six levels of RAID configurations can be established. The first one is Level 0. It distributes the data across several disks. As the data volume and rate to any disk depend on sum total you get larger capacity and greater efficiency from RAID 0 than from a classical disk. Your data can also be stored from several disks as once. This feature can be beneficial for you when greater speed is necessary, i.e. in shared situations, for example game servers and peer to peer file. The disadvantage of RAID 0 is that it is not safe for important information which will be lost if your disk failed, since there is no assignment for error correction. Therefore, RAID 0 is most useful when you look for larger disk capacity only. After RAID 0 comes RAID Level 1. This configuration level is also called “Disk Mirroring”. It uses disks in pairs to save the files in a redundant way. With RAID 1 setup performance may become slower due to the time necessary for the host adapter to forward the information and for the drives to write it to disk. One may also change files, which will be stored on both drives in this way. RAID 1 provides greater reliability than RAID 0 but still your data are not completely safe. Third in sequence there is RAID 2. It uses more disks for error correction codes so the data that are lost could be recovered. RAID 3 is almost the same as the preceding level. The code it uses is simpler and the storage capacity could be less. RAID 4 resembles RAID 3. However, it operates at a sector level. Here you have better data reliability, as well as improved best performance because of the more concerted writing to the drives in smaller sectors. RAID Level 5 is as perfect as RAID 4, but here the data stream is striped across all the disks, not just one. You get both reliability and efficiency for your computer. You can instantly backup your data and write it to two drives when you are writing data to a RAID. The RAID storage array allows you to pull out the bad drive and replace it with a brand new hardware. RAID storage array is most regularly connected with FireWire, SCSI, IDE, ATA, SATA, FibreChannel or even USB if your best option goes for external hardware. Finally you should consider what is your prior importance, between the capacity of the disks, the reliability of the information, the performance, or all these together, whenever you decide to choose RAID storage array.
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