Brief Introduction of RAID and advantage and drawback of different types of RAID levels

In this article we learn about the definition of RAID, different categories of RAID and explained the advantage and drawback of different levels of RAID.

Brief Introduction of RAID-What is RAID

Full form of RAID is redundant array of independent disks that store data among the multiple disks to provide huge performance and to provide fault tolerance to the system.

Brief Introduction of RAID and advantage and drawback of different types of RAID levels

Different categories of RAID

There are two categories of RAID one is hardware RAID and other is software RAID.

Hardware RAID: Hardware RAID is managed by the RAID controller.

Software RAID: Software RAID is the part of os and it is very cost effective as we don’t need any additional hardware to configure the software RAID.

Different levels of RAID

RAID0: It is called data striping. RAID0 split data among the multiple disk to increase the performance. An individual data read from the multiple disk to increase performance and write the data on different disks to increase read write speed.It does not provide any redundancy while one of the disks is failed there will be a chance of data lose.

Advantage:Increase the performance.

Drawback: does not provide redundancy.

RAID1: It is called data mirroring because it read write the identical data among the multiple disks. While one disk is failure we can retrieve data from the other working disk. So it provides redundancy .while we replace the new disk in the place of failure disk data will automatically sync with each other.

Advantage: It provides redundancy as well as fault tolerance.

Drawback: gets less usable capacity.

RAID5: It is called striping with parity because it strip the data among the multiple disk to increase the performance just like RAID0 and also store the parity information to retrieve the data in case of failure any disk. When a disk is gone bad it uses the parity information to retrieve the data.

Advantage: Fault tolerance and good performance.

Drawback: Lower performance due to parity overhead.

RAID6: It is called striping with double parity. It store extra parity block to increase the fault tolerance than RAID5.

Advantage: Fault tolerance and good performance.

Drawback: Lower performance due to parity overhead.

RAID10: It is combination of RAID0(data striping) for increased performance and RAID1(data mirroring) for high redundancy.

Advantage: It provides high performance and high redundancy.

Drawback: gets less usable capacity .

Brief Introduction of RAID and advantage and drawback of different types of RAID levels