What is RAID?

RAID is an acronym first defined back in 1987 to describe a redundant array of inexpensive disks, a technology
that allowed computer users to achieve high levels of storage reliability from low-cost PC hard disk drives, via the
technique of arranging the devices into an array for fail-safe redundancy.

"RAID" is now used as an umbrella term for computer data storage schemes that can divide and replicate data
among multiple hard disk drives. The different schemes/architectures are named by the word RAID followed by a
number, as in RAID 0, RAID 1, etc. RAID's various designs involve two key elements: increased data reliability or
increased input/output performance. When multiple physical disks are set up to use RAID technology, they are
said to be in a RAID array. This array distributes data across multiple disks, but the array is seen by the
computer user and operating system as one single disk. RAID can be set up to serve several different purposes.

Organizing disks into a redundant array decreases the total usable storage capacity. For instance, a 2-disk RAID
1 array loses half of the total capacity that would have otherwise been available using both disks independently,
and a RAID 5 array with several disks loses the capacity of one whole disk. Other types of RAID arrays are
arranged so that they are faster to write to and read from than a single disk.

There are various combinations of these configurations giving different trade-offs and benefits of protection
against data loss, capacity, and speed. RAID levels 0, 1, and 5 are the most commonly found, and cover most of
the typical requirements.

• RAID 0 (striped disks) distributes data across several disks in a way that gives improved speed at any
given instant. If one disk fails, however, all of the data on the array will be lost, as there is neither
parity nor mirroring.
• RAID 1 mirrors the contents of the disks, making a 1:1 (1 to 1) ratio real-time backup. The contents of
each disk in the array are identical to that of every other disk in the array.
• RAID 3 uses a striped set with dedicated parity or bit interleaved parity or byte level parity. This
mechanism provides fault tolerance similar to RAID 5. However, because the strip across the disks is a
lot smaller than a file system block, reads and writes to the array perform like a single drive with a high
linear write performance. If one drive fails, the performance doesn't change.
• RAID 5 (striped disks with parity) combines three or more disks in a way that protects against data
loss of any one disk. The storage capacity of the array is reduced by the capacity of the one disk (all
disks are of equal size).
• RAID 6 (striped disks with dual parity) can recover from the loss of two disks.
• RAID 10 (or 1+0) uses both striping and mirroring. ("01" or "0+1" is sometimes distinguished from
"10" or "1+0": a striped set of mirrored subsets and a mirrored set of striped subsets are both valid,
but distinct, configurations.)