Leveling Up: What RAID Levels Mean to Data Storage Whether it’s RAID 1 or RAID 10, both use mirroring and disk striping to establish a strong foundation for data recovery. (The original definition of RAID referred to inexpensive disks, which pointed to the ability to create a reliable fast storage from any devices you have.)ĭisks – Multiple disks allow disk striping to create copies of data across the storage areas in a way that speeds up both saving and recovering the information.ĭata recovery for a RAID system combines these two into a single process. Independent – Keeping the hard disks independent increases fault tolerance, allowing data to be read from the RAID massive in the event of a single disk outage. Redundant – By using additional disks, RAID makes multiple copies of data speed up the IO operations or to add reliability.Īrray – Disk arrays create a system that can stand unreliability of one or more disks in the array. Let’s break down the acronym and dive a bit deeper. RAID stores information across multiple disks to improve performance by speeding up the I/O operations. Disk mirroring makes copies of the information spread across those hard disks. How RAID 10 works by using disk striping and mirroringĭisk striping spreads information across a variety of hard disks. As it transfers the new data, it also requests the old information's replacement. This process increases an application's I/O because every time you add new information, the application sends a message to the hard disk.
Synchronous mirroring copies data continuously as you make changes. This copy includes your files as well as your applications. For backup purposes, a disk mirror is a copy of everything on your hard disk. Disk Mirror on the Hard DriveĪ disk mirror is a copy of files either on a website or a server. By spreading, or striping, the data across several disks, the applications can search the hard disks quickly to find what they need during their requests. Disk striping speeds up those processes by allowing two disks to work simultaneously because neither holds all the information for a single application. The input/output (I/O) processes can slow down a computer if the information is all stored in a single place. Now apply that approach to applications transferring data to and from your computer. But if the toys are organized by type into several smaller boxes, the child can scan for the type of toy he wants first, allowing him to find specific toy faster in that smaller box. To find the toy he wants, he has to dig through all of the toys. Think of it this way: Imagine a child has all of his toys stored in one large toy box. It does this by spreading the information out making it easier to find.
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As you add information, your computer stacks these "blocks" on top of one another, creating a data tower called a "strip." In a RAID device, you have more than one disk, and the series of hard disks and their strips are called a stripe.ĭisk striping uses strips and stripes to allow applications to run as fast as possible. Each piece of data you input is one block. Imagine information on a hard disk as stackable toy blocks. When you store a lot of data, your systems use data striping for optimum performance.
What the different RAID data recovery configurations are.
What disk mirroring does to help recover data.These multi-drive devices help keep your data available by making sure your storage includes a built-in fail-safe.
RAID storage is based on a "Redundant Array of Independent Disks" – hence the name.