Raid Research Essay

The word RAID stands for redundant ray of independent disks. Raid is usually used in environments with servers or at a business with large file servers, transaction of application servers, where data accessibility is critical, and fault tolerance is required. There are 8 types of raids, Raid 0 is technically not a raid level because it offers no fault tolerance but, it operates by providing data stripping which takes the information and spreads it out over all the disk drives. However, if one drive fails than the entire raid fails. Raid 1 is also referred to as disk mirroring; it basically takes the information from one disk and stores it on multiple disks, this is great for fault tolerance because if one disk fails the information is on another disk. The only drawback to raid 1 is data access speed and the cost because there are more disks involved. Raid 5 is considerably the most commonly used Raid level simply because it provides both stripping and parity. The parity block is dist ributed to all of the drives making it easier to access the information or have a balanced access load. The parity in raid 5 is used if one of the drives happens to fail, to recover that drive which makes the raid 5 the most common however the only drawback to this raid level is that it has a relatively slow write cycle. Lastly, RAID level 6 which is very similar to raid level 5 but provides two parity functions rather than just one. A minimum of four disks is required to create RAID level 6. Raid level 0, even though it offers no redundancy, is still of use mainly to those who use applications that require high bandwidth such as data streaming or video editing software. Raid level 0 is also used because it’s most simple to implement. Raid level 1 is most expensive because it requires more disks to implement. It also requires heavy software manipulation and configuration to implement Raid level 1. If I were to purchase raid it would absolutely be raid level 0 simply because its easy to implement and it would be efficient for my personal usage.