Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) Striping of data across multiple media for expansion, performance and reliability.

RAID Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) - A storage system, not a file system Patterson, Katz, and Gibson (Berkeley, 88) - Idea: Use many disks in parallel to increase storage bandwidth, improve reliability - Files are striped across disks - Each stripe portion is read/written in parallel - Bandwidth increases with more disks Problems : - Small files (small writes less than a full stripe) - Need to read entire stripe, update with small write, then write entire segment out to disks - Reliability: more disks increases the chance of media failure (MTBF) - Turn reliability problem into a feature - Use one disk to store parity data: XOR of all data blocks in stripe - Can recover any data block from all others + parity block - redundant - Overhead

Common RAID Levels RAID 0: Striping - Good for random access (no reliability) RAID 1: Mirroring - Two disks, write data to both (expensive, 1X storage overhead) RAID 5: Floating parity - Parity blocks for different stripes written to different disks - No single parity disk, hence no bottleneck at that disk RAID 10: Striping plus mirroring - Higher bandwidth, but still have large overhead

RAID 0 (data striping) which is a way of distributing reads and writes across multiple disks for improved disk performance. Striping reduces the overall load placed on each component disk in that different segments of data can be simultaneously read or written to multiple disks at once. The total amount of storage available is the sum of all component disks. Disks of different sizes may be used, but the size of the smallest disk will limit the amount of space usable on all of the disks. Data protection and fault tolerance is not provided by RAID0, as none of the data is duplicated. A failure in any one of the disks will render the RAID unusable and data will have been lost. However, RAID0 arrays are sometimes used for readonly fileserving of alreadyprotected data.Linux users wishing to concatenate multiple disks into a single, larger virtual device should consider. Logical Volume Management (LVM). LVM supports striping and allows dynamically growing or shrinking logical volumes and concatenation of disks of different sizes.

RAID 1 (disk mirroring) RAID1 (mirroring) is an implementation where all written data is duplicated (or mirrored) to each constituent disk, thus providing data protection and fault tolerance. RAID1 can also provide improved performance, as the RAID controllers have multiple disks from which to read when one or more are busy. The total storage available to a RAID1 user, however, is equal to the smallest disk in the set, and thus RAID1 does not provide a greater storage capacity. An optimal RAID1 configuration will usually have two identically sized disks. A failure of one of the disks will not result in data lost since all of the data exists on both disks, and the RAID will continue to operate (though in a state unprotected against a failure of the remaining disk). The faulty disk can be replaced, the data synchronized to the new disk, and the RAID1 protection restored.

RAID 2 (bit), 3 (byte) striping RAID2 (bit striping) RAID2 stripes data at the bit level across disks and uses a Hamming code for parity. However, the performance of bit striping is abysmal and RAID2 is not practically used. RAID3 (byte striping) RAID3 stripes data at the byte level and dedicates an entire disk for parity. Like RAID2, RAID3 is not practically used for performance reasons. As most any read requires more than one byte of data, reads involve operations on every disk in the set. Such disk access will easily thrash a system. Additionally, loss of the parity disk yields a system vulnerable to corrupted data.

RAID 4 (block), 5 (block w/parity) striping RAID4 (block striping) RAID4 stripes data at the blocklevel and dedicates an entire disk for parity. RAID4 is similar to both RAID2 and RAID3 but significantly improves performance as any read request contained within a single block can be serviced from a single disk. RAID4 is used on a limited basis due to the storage penalty and data corruption vulnerability of dedicating an entire disk to parity. RAID5 (block striping with striped parity) RAID5 implements block level striping like RAID4, but instead stripes the parity information across all disks as well. In this way, the total storage capacity is maximized and parity information is distributed across all disks. RAID5 also supports hot spares, which are disks that are members of the RAID but not in active use. The hot spares are activated and added to the RAID upon the detection of a failed disk. RAID5 is the most commonly used level as it provides the best combination of benefits and acceptable costs.