What does RAID stand for ?
In 1987, Patterson, Gibson and Katz at the University of California Berkeley, published a paper entitled "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)" . This paper described various types of disk arrays, referred to by the acronym RAID. The basic idea of RAID was to combine multiple small, inexpensive disk drives into an array of disk drives which yields performance exceeding that of a Single Large Expensive Drive (SLED). Additionally, this array of drives appears to the computer as a single logical storage unit or drive.
The Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of the array will be equal to the MTBF of an individual drive, divided by the number of drives in the array. Because of this, the MTBF of an array of drives would be too low for many application requirements. However, disk arrays can be made fault-tolerant by redundantly storing information in various ways.
Five types of array architectures, RAID-1 through RAID-5, were defined by the Berkeley paper, 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.
# Data Striping
Fundamental to RAID is "striping", a method of concatenating multiple drives into one logical storage unit. Striping involves partitioning each drive's storage space into stripes which may be as small as one sector (512 bytes) or as large as several megabytes. These stripes are then interleaved round-robin, so that the combined space is composed alternately of stripes from each drive. In effect, the storage space of the drives is shuffled like a deck of cards. The type of application environment, I/O or data intensive, determines whether large or small stripes should be used.
Most multi-user operating systems today, like NT, Unix and Netware, support overlapped disk I/O operations across multiple drives. However, in order to maximize throughput for the disk subsystem, the I/O load must be balanced across all the drives so that each drive can be kept busy as much as possible. In a multiple drive system without striping, the disk I/O load is never perfectly balanced. Some drives will contain data files which are frequently accessed and some drives will only rarely be accessed. In I/O intensive environments, performance is optimized by striping the drives in the array with stripes large enough so that each record potentially falls entirely within one stripe. This ensures that the data and I/O will be evenly distributed across the array, allowing each drive to work on a different I/O operation, and thus maximize the number of simultaneous I/O operations which can be performed by the array.
In data intensive environments and single-user systems which access large records, small stripes (typically one 512-byte sector in length) can be used so that each record will span across all the drives in the array, each drive storing part of the data from the record. This causes long record accesses to be performed faster, since the data transfer occurs in parallel on multiple drives. Unfortunately, small stripes rule out multiple overlapped I/O operations, since each I/O will typically involve all drives. However, operating systems like DOS which do not allow overlapped disk I/O, will not be negatively impacted. Applications such as on-demand video/audio, medical imaging and data acquisition, which utilize long record accesses, will achieve optimum performance with small stripe arrays.
A potential drawback to using small stripes is that synchronized spindle drives are required in order to keep performance from being degraded when short records are accessed. Without synchronized spindles, each drive in the array will be at different random rotational positions. Since an I/O cannot be completed until every drive has accessed its part of the record, the drive which takes the longest will determine when the I/O completes. The more drives in the array, the more the average access time for the array approaches the worst case single-drive access time. Synchronized spindles assure that every drive in the array reaches its data at the same time. The access time of the array will thus be equal to the average access time of a single drive rather than approaching the worst case access time.
# The different RAID levels
RAID-0
RAID Level 0 is not redundant, hence does not truly fit the "RAID" acronym. In level 0, data is split across drives, resulting in higher data throughput. Since no redundant information is stored, performance is very good, but the failure of any disk in the array results in data loss. This level is commonly referred to as striping.
RAID-1
RAID Level 1 provides redundancy by writing all data to two or more drives. The performance of a level 1 array tends to be faster on reads and slower on writes compared to a single drive, but