RAID - Redundant Array of Independent Disks

Information has become a commodity in today’s world, and protecting that information has become mission critical. The Internet has helped push this information age forward. Popular websites process so much information, that any type of slowdown or downtime can mean the loss of millions of dollars. Clearly, just a bunch of hard disks won’t be able to cut it anymore. So Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks (RAID) was developed to increase the performance and reliability of data storage by spreading data across multiple drives. RAID technology has grown and evolved throughout the years to meet these ever-growing demands for speed and data security.

What is RAID?

A technique was developed to provide speed, reliability, and increased storage capacity using multiple disks, rather than single disk solutions. RAID takes multiple hard drives and allows them to be used as one large hard drive with benefits depending on the scheme or level of RAID being used. The better the RAID implementation, the more expensive it is. There is no one best RAID implementation. Some implementations are better than others depending upon the actual application. It used to be that RAID was only available in expensive server systems. However, with the advent of inexpensive RAID controllers, it seems it has pretty much reached the mainstream market.

The basic concepts made use of in RAID are:

1. Mirroring
2. Parity
3. ECC
4. Exclusive OR
5. Striping

RAID LEVELS:

The concepts described above are made use of in implementing the different levels of RAID. These single RAID levels can be combined together in different ways to provide more functionality.

• RAID 0
• RAID 1
• RAID 2
• RAID 3
• RAID 4
• RAID 5
• RAID 6
• RAID 10
• RAID 50

RAID is a good solution for companies or individuals craving more transfer performance, redundancy, and storage capacity in their data  storage systems. There aremany levels of RAID, which range from very simple and cheap to extremely complexand expensive. The benefits of having RAID in our system are obvious; however, theprice tag of the RAID implementations is still a hurdle to overcome.