RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is one of those elusive terms that we hear frequently but the bulk of us aren't really sure what it is or can do for us. Recently, following the review of two AOpen Athlon 64 mainboards that supported RAID, it occurred to me that I understood the basics of RAID but had never run one before. In doing some online searches, I couldn't find any benchmarks to show what if any measurable performance benefits there are. With that said, let me take an opportunity to quickly cover what RAID is, what it can do for you and give you some hard numbers to see.

RAID came out of efforts to combine several inexpensive drives to equal or exceed the performance of a larger and more expensive disk drive. There are lots of different types of RAID that involve the storing of error checking and parity data. In an effort to not put any of us to sleep and keeping things simple, I want to focus on the two big RAID uses that the vast majority of us could benefit from, RAID 0 and RAID 1.

Answered by Yash , an ibibo Master, at 9:28 AM on June 26, 2008

well munna, RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is one of those elusive terms that we hear frequently but the bulk of us aren't really sure what it is or can do for us. Recently, following the review of two AOpen Athlon 64 mainboards that supported RAID, it occurred to me that I understood the basics of RAID but had never run one before. In doing some online searches, I couldn't find any benchmarks to show what if any measurable performance benefits there are. With that said, let me take an opportunity to quickly cover what RAID is, what it can do for you and give you some hard numbers to see.

RAID came out of efforts to combine several inexpensive drives to equal or exceed the performance of a larger and more expensive disk drive. There are lots of different types of RAID that involve the storing of error checking and parity data. In an effort to not put any of us to sleep and keeping things simple, I want to focus on the two big RAID uses that the vast majority of us could benefit from, RAID 0 and RAID 1.

RAID 1 is basically a fail safe set up for your hard drive. Two drives are set up in RAID 1 form which provides all data be written twice. Once to hard drive A and once to hard drive B. This set up is for redundancy to keep your data effectively backed up at all times. You may hear the term "mirroring" when referring to RAID 1. This is a perfect term because you are making two drives that mirror one another. Imagine for a second that your primary computer's hard drive just up and dies on you. While this is rare, it is far from uncommon. All your data is effectively gone. Your financial information if you do your bills with something like MS Money or Quicken - gone, the e-mail address of all your friends and even that hot chick from two weeks ago - gone, your term paper - gone, activation codes for downloaded software - gone, etc. With your drives being mirrored, if one drive dies you still have all your data and remain up and running. The only downside is that you are halving your disk drive dollar to pay for this redundancy. Two 80 gb hard drives in RAID 1 give you 80 gb of storage, not 160 if you just had them plugged in as drive C and drive E. But let me pose a question for you to consider, if your lone hard drive crashed, would it be worth say $75 to have everything back running fine? I think that says it all right there.

RAID 0 is the performance side of the house. RAID 0 or "striping" uses two drives in conjunction with one other for speed. Data is divided when it is written to both drives so that the workload is balanced and thus more efficient. The data is broken up into chunks or stripes when it is alternatingly stored. There is no redundancy of data with RAID 0. You should be using two identical drives if you are setting up a RAID 0 but this is not required. Two different drives can be used but at a small cost. Keeping in mind that the workload is being balanced, the computer sets the drives up to be equal. If you have an 80 and a 120 gb drive, RAID 0 will have your machine treat them as two 80 gb drives, ignoring the extra 40 gb of space on drive two.
For more details , Please visit the source site :

http://askbobrankin.com/w hat_i s_raid.html

Answered by Romi , an ibibo Master, at 5:34 PM on June 17, 2008

RAID came out of efforts to combine several inexpensive drives to equal or exceed the performance of a larger and more expensive disk drive. There are lots of different types of RAID that involve the storing of error checking and parity data. In an effort to not put any of us to sleep and keeping things simple, I want to focus on the two big RAID uses that the vast majority of us could benefit from, RAID 0 and RAID 1.

RAID 1 is basically a fail safe set up for your hard drive. Two drives are set up in RAID 1 form which provides all data be written twice. Once to hard drive A and once to hard drive B. This set up is for redundancy to keep your data effectively backed up at all times. You may hear the term "mirroring" when referring to RAID 1. This is a perfect term because you are making two drives that mirror one another. Imagine for a second that your primary computer's hard drive just up and dies on you. While this is rare, it is far from uncommon. All your data is effectively gone. Your financial information if you do your bills with something like MS Money or Quicken - gone, the e-mail address of all your friends and even that hot chick from two weeks ago - gone, your term paper - gone, activation codes for downloaded software - gone, etc. With your drives being mirrored, if one drive dies you still have all your data and remain up and running. The only downside is that you are halving your disk drive dollar to pay for this redundancy. Two 80 gb hard drives in RAID 1 give you 80 gb of storage, not 160 if you just had them plugged in as drive C and drive E. But let me pose a question for you to consider, if your lone hard drive crashed, would it be worth say $75 to have everything back running fine? I think that says it all right there.

Answered by Raksha , an ibibo Master, at 9:10 PM on June 16, 2008

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is one of those elusive terms that we hear frequently but the bulk of us aren't really sure what it is or can do for us. Recently, following the review of two AOpen Athlon 64 mainboards that supported RAID, it occurred to me that I understood the basics of RAID but had never run one before. In doing some online searches, I couldn't find any benchmarks to show what if any measurable performance benefits there are. With that said, let me take an opportunity to quickly cover what RAID is, what it can do for you and give you some hard numbers to see.

RAID came out of efforts to combine several inexpensive drives to equal or exceed the performance of a larger and more expensive disk drive. There are lots of different types of RAID that involve the storing of error checking and parity data. In an effort to not put any of us to sleep and keeping things simple, I want to focus on the two big RAID uses that the vast majority of us could benefit from, RAID 0 and RAID 1.

Answered by Anju Singh , an ibibo Master, at 9:00 AM on June 12, 2008

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is one of those elusive terms that we hear frequently but the bulk of us aren't really sure what it is or can do for us. Recently, following the review of two AOpen Athlon 64 mainboards that supported RAID, it occurred to me that I understood the basics of RAID but had never run one before. In doing some online searches, I couldn't find any benchmarks to show what if any measurable performance benefits there are. With that said, let me take an opportunity to quickly cover what RAID is, what it can do for you and give you some hard numbers to see.

RAID came out of efforts to combine several inexpensive drives to equal or exceed the performance of a larger and more expensive disk drive. There are lots of different types of RAID that involve the storing of error checking and parity data. In an effort to not put any of us to sleep and keeping things simple, I want to focus on the two big RAID uses that the vast majority of us could benefit from, RAID 0 and RAID 1.

Answered by Madhurima , an ibibo Master, at 5:48 PM on June 11, 2008

Hi there

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is one of those elusive terms that we hear frequently but the bulk of us aren't really sure what it is or can do for us. Recently, following the review of two AOpen Athlon 64 mainboards that supported RAID, it occurred to me that I understood the basics of RAID but had never run one before. In doing some online searches, I couldn't find any benchmarks to show what if any measurable performance benefits there are. With that said, let me take an opportunity to quickly cover what RAID is, what it can do for you and give you some hard numbers to see.

RAID came out of efforts to combine several inexpensive drives to equal or exceed the performance of a larger and more expensive disk drive. There are lots of different types of RAID that involve the storing of error checking and parity data. In an effort to not put any of us to sleep and keeping things simple, I want to focus on the two big RAID uses that the vast majority of us could benefit from, RAID 0 and RAID 1.

RAID 1 is basically a fail safe set up for your hard drive. Two drives are set up in RAID 1 form which provides all data be written twice. Once to hard drive A and once to hard drive B. This set up is for redundancy to keep your data effectively backed up at all times. You may hear the term "mirroring" when referring to RAID 1. This is a perfect term because you are making two drives that mirror one another. Imagine for a second that your primary computer's hard drive just up and dies on you. While this is rare, it is far from uncommon. All your data is effectively gone. Your financial information if you do your bills with something like MS Money or Quicken - gone, the e-mail address of all your friends and even that hot chick from two weeks ago - gone, your term paper - gone, activation codes for downloaded software - gone, etc. With your drives being mirrored, if one drive dies you still have all your data and remain up and running. The only downside is that you are halving your disk drive dollar to pay for this redundancy. Two 80 gb hard drives in RAID 1 give you 80 gb of storage, not 160 if you just had them plugged in as drive C and drive E. But let me pose a question for you to consider, if your lone hard drive crashed, would it be worth say $75 to have everything back running fine? I think that says it all right there.

RAID 0 is the performance side of the house. RAID 0 or "striping" uses two drives in conjunction with one other for speed. Data is divided when it is written to both drives so that the workload is balanced and thus more efficient. The data is broken up into chunks or stripes when it is alternatingly stored. There is no redundancy of data with RAID 0. You should be using two identical drives if you are setting up a RAID 0 but this is not required. Two different drives can be used but at a small cost. Keeping in mind that the workload is being balanced, the computer sets the drives up to be equal. If you have an 80 and a 120 gb drive, RAID 0 will have your machine treat them as two 80 gb drives, ignoring the extra 40 gb of space on drive two.
source site :

http://askbobrankin.com/w hat_i s_raid.html

Answered by Reeta K , an ibibo Master, at 12:29 PM on June 11, 2008

well
RAID stands for "redundant array of independent disks" (originally "redundant array of inexpensive disks"). It is a technology that describes several ways of coordinating multiple disks so that they behave as a single unit. Most RAID implementations accomplish this through a technique called striping. A stripe is a disk segment varying in size from one sector (usually 512 bytes) up to several megabytes. The stripes of the independent disks are re-ordered to distribute disk I/O across all of them. For example, a RAID with four disks (A, B, C, and D), with each disk divided into four stripes (1, 2, 3, and 4), might write and read data in this order:

A1 --> B1 --> C1 --> D1 --> A2 --> B2 --> C2 --> D2 --> . . .

Because all the disks can read and write simultaneously, a RAID is potentially much faster than a single hard drive. On the other hand, because it has so many components, a RAID is more prone to disk failure. For this reason, most RAID implementations store parity information to reconstruct lost data in the event of a crash.

Several RAID levels exist, each optimized for different storage requirements:

RAID 0:


RAID 0 sacrifices fault tolerance for raw speed. It doesn't store parity information, but with its small stripes, it can work with large files much faster than any other RAID. Because it is not fault tolerant, RAID 0 is inappropriate for the storage of critical data.

RAID 1:


RAID 1, also known as disk mirroring, makes use of neither striping nor parity information. Instead, each RAID 1 array consists of two disks that duplicate each other's data and are treated as one drive. A computer can read from both disks and thus access data faster. However, because the entire contents of a disk are duplicated, RAID 1 uses space less efficiently than RAID levels that store parity information.

RAID 2:


In RAID 2 some drives are striped while others hold error checking and correcting (ECC) data. Because nearly all modern drives have ECC built-in, RAID 2 is infrequently implemented.

RAID 3:


In RAID 3, all but one of the drives in the array are striped. The final disk is devoted to the storage of parity information. RAID 3 stripes are small, so all the disks work together when reading and writing large files. This greatly increases performance, but as each task accesses all the disks, it is not possible to overlap I/O (i.e., do two tasks at the same time). For this reason, RAID 3 is inappropriate for multi-user environments.

RAID 4:


RAID 4 is identical to RAID 3, except that it uses large stripes instead of small ones. Because files usually only span one drive, it is possible to overlap I/O. Unfortunately, because each access must update parity information, the parity drive becomes a bottleneck that increases in severity as the number of drives increases.

RAID 5:


RAID 5 is similar to RAID 4 except that, rather than devoting a single device to parity information, it divides it among all the drives. This eliminates the bottleneck created by RAID 4's parity drive.

RAID 6:


RAID 6 is like RAID 5 except that it adds a second parity scheme. It is slower than RAID 5, but offers greater protection of data.

RAID 7:


RAID 7 is a proprietary solution offered by Storage Computer Corporation. It is a very expensive, high-speed option that relies on caching and an embedded operating system that manages I/O.

RAID 10:


A RAID 10 (i.e., RAID 1+0) array uses several RAID 1 arrays and stripes them to form a single unit. RAID 10 is very fast and highly fault tolerant, but also extremely expensive.

RAID 53:


RAID 53 is similar to RAID 10, but each segment is a RAID 3 array rather than a RAID 1. Like RAID 10, it is fast but expensive.

Answered by Arti singh , an ibibo Specialist, at 9:47 AM on June 11, 2008

well munna, RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is one of those elusive terms that we hear frequently but the bulk of us aren't really sure what it is or can do for us. Recently, following the review of two AOpen Athlon 64 mainboards that supported RAID, it occurred to me that I understood the basics of RAID but had never run one before. In doing some online searches, I couldn't find any benchmarks to show what if any measurable performance benefits there are. With that said, let me take an opportunity to quickly cover what RAID is, what it can do for you and give you some hard numbers to see.

RAID came out of efforts to combine several inexpensive drives to equal or exceed the performance of a larger and more expensive disk drive. There are lots of different types of RAID that involve the storing of error checking and parity data. In an effort to not put any of us to sleep and keeping things simple, I want to focus on the two big RAID uses that the vast majority of us could benefit from, RAID 0 and RAID 1.

RAID 1 is basically a fail safe set up for your hard drive. Two drives are set up in RAID 1 form which provides all data be written twice. Once to hard drive A and once to hard drive B. This set up is for redundancy to keep your data effectively backed up at all times. You may hear the term "mirroring" when referring to RAID 1. This is a perfect term because you are making two drives that mirror one another. Imagine for a second that your primary computer's hard drive just up and dies on you. While this is rare, it is far from uncommon. All your data is effectively gone. Your financial information if you do your bills with something like MS Money or Quicken - gone, the e-mail address of all your friends and even that hot chick from two weeks ago - gone, your term paper - gone, activation codes for downloaded software - gone, etc. With your drives being mirrored, if one drive dies you still have all your data and remain up and running. The only downside is that you are halving your disk drive dollar to pay for this redundancy. Two 80 gb hard drives in RAID 1 give you 80 gb of storage, not 160 if you just had them plugged in as drive C and drive E. But let me pose a question for you to consider, if your lone hard drive crashed, would it be worth say $75 to have everything back running fine? I think that says it all right there.

RAID 0 is the performance side of the house. RAID 0 or "striping" uses two drives in conjunction with one other for speed. Data is divided when it is written to both drives so that the workload is balanced and thus more efficient. The data is broken up into chunks or stripes when it is alternatingly stored. There is no redundancy of data with RAID 0. You should be using two identical drives if you are setting up a RAID 0 but this is not required. Two different drives can be used but at a small cost. Keeping in mind that the workload is being balanced, the computer sets the drives up to be equal. If you have an 80 and a 120 gb drive, RAID 0 will have your machine treat them as two 80 gb drives, ignoring the extra 40 gb of space on drive two.
For more details , Please visit the source site :

http://askbobrankin.com/w hat_i s_raid.html

Answered by satyaiitk , an ibibo Master, at 12:31 PM on June 10, 2008

well, RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is one of those elusive terms that we hear frequently but the bulk of us aren't really sure what it is or can do for us. Recently, following the review of two AOpen Athlon 64 mainboards that supported RAID, it occurred to me that I understood the basics of RAID but had never run one before. In doing some online searches, I couldn't find any benchmarks to show what if any measurable performance benefits there are. With that said, let me take an opportunity to quickly cover what RAID is, what it can do for you and give you some hard numbers to see.

RAID came out of efforts to combine several inexpensive drives to equal or exceed the performance of a larger and more expensive disk drive. There are lots of different types of RAID that involve the storing of error checking and parity data. In an effort to not put any of us to sleep and keeping things simple, I want to focus on the two big RAID uses that the vast majority of us could benefit from, RAID 0 and RAID 1.

The main advantage of a RAID drive is that it increases the performance and reliability of the system. The RAID drive is a convincing example that could be used in a server/data center for backups. The RAID regularly checks for any possibility of a system crash by increasing the parity check. Very high rate of transfer when data is being accessed in large chunks sequentially.

A major disadvantage regarding the RAID drive is that drivers for a Network Operating System (NOS) need to be written when used in servers. Hence the device drivers should be included so as to design the system. Administrators find it very difficult to configure a RAID system. The ability to dynamically enlarge the RAID server is also a complex process. RAID system compatibility is another problem. Initially one has to determine the type of RAID drives that is compatible.

Answered by Saurabh , an ibibo Master, at 6:21 AM on June 10, 2008

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) involves combining two or more drives together to improve the performance and the fault tolerance. Fundamental to RAID is "striping", a method of concatenating multiple drives into one logical storage unit. Combining two or more drives together also offers improved reliability and larger data volume sizes. A RAID distributes the data across several disks and the operating system considers this array as a single disk. Five types of array architectures, RAID-1 through RAID-5, were defined, each providing disk fault-tolerance and each offering different trade-offs in features and performance. In addition to these five redundant array architectures, it has become popular to refer to a non-redundant array of disk drives as a RAID-0 array.

The main advantage of a RAID drive is that it increases the performance and reliability of the system. The RAID drive is a convincing example that could be used in a server/data center for backups. The RAID regularly checks for any possibility of a system crash by increasing the parity check. Very high rate of transfer when data is being accessed in large chunks sequentially.

A major disadvantage regarding the RAID drive is that drivers for a Network Operating System (NOS) need to be written when used in servers. Hence the device drivers should be included so as to design the system. Administrators find it very difficult to configure a RAID system. The ability to dynamically enlarge the RAID server is also a complex process. RAID system compatibility is another problem. Initially one has to determine the type of RAID drives that is compatible.

Answered by Shobhit , an ibibo Master, at 5:25 PM on June 09, 2008