Hack #64. Speed It Up with RAID

If one fast drive is good, then five working together is surely better.

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) technology has been a significant lifesaver and performance boost for file servers. RAID can be set up in different configurations to provide systems with fault-tolerance or performance enhancements that are crucial to keeping data safe. It can be applied to personal desktop systems to provide significant disk drive performance enhancement.

RAID-0 (zero) is the most basic and highest performing RAID configuration. Portions of data normally stored on one disk drive are spread out across multiple drives, and those drives are accessed in parallel to deliver the data faster, because each drive does not have to access all of the data before it can be delivered. RAID-0 is unfortunately and by nature the least reliable in terms of data integrity, because a failure in any single drive renders all of the data useless.

In contrast to RAID-0, in a RAID-1 configuration all of the data is stored equally on two drives, in parallel. This slows the storage and reading performance but almost guarantees that the data remains intact even if one of the drives fails.

RAID-5 is somewhat a mix of RAID-0 and RAID-1, striping data across multiple drives but also adding error correction information across the drives, providing the advantages of parallel drives and a high degree of ability to recover data if one drive should fail.

Another hybrid implementation of ...

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