RAID : It ’s not just for Warcraft wonk anymore . If you ’ve got a long ton of euphony , photos and video and you do n’t make out about RAID heavy - drive arrays yet , read this — or brandish your cute media files buh - bye .
RAID sound like vaguely scary , like something you to do a French hamlet if you ’re a Viking or what you do on a Saturday night if you ’re a solitary , sad soul , but really it just stand forredundant regalia of independent disk . Which really just means a big bucks of hard drives do like one superharddrive . There are a few of different kinds of RAID configurations and they do different things — one kind give you crazyfast carrying out , another makes your storage safe than a single hard private road act alone via redundance .
The most likely place you ’re fail to run into RAID — if you ’re not conversant with it already — is when youjump into the earthly concern of internet attached entrepot , aka NAS , cater a vast savings bank of hard - drive goodness for storage , fill-in and media cyclosis across all of your home or office information processing system and machine .
https://gizmodo.com/how-to-choose-the-best-internet-storage-for-a-mac-pc-hom-5067201
But okay , let ’s jump into thebasic kindsof RAID setups , known annoyingly as levels , even though they are mostly unlike . If you wanna skim , the 1 you should know are RAID 0 , RAID 1 , and RAID 5 .
• RAID 0 isall about performance , employing what ’s call striping , where data point is break up into fragment and written across multiple drives , sort of treating them as one gargantuan private road . countenance ’s assume we ’ve got a setup with four hard disk . The performance bound comes from the fact you ’re getting massive throughput — it ’s like go bad from one lane to four , since you ’re writing and access all four driveway in latitude . It ’s for pros and crazies address massive files , like HD video redaction . The downside is that if even one of the surd drives fail , you lose everything . Every single file is now uncomplete . It ’s not technically RAID since there ’s no redundancy going on — possibly hence the zero . You take at least two disks for this .
• RAID 1 is the independent configuration most novices should learn about . Itwrites , or mirrors , datato multiple saucer , so you ’ve got multiple hard drive that are precisely the same . manifestly , this is right for information dependability , since if one fails , you ’ve got another . If you do n’t have an independent disk controller or host adapter for saucer , however , performance can be kind of crummy trying to write to the platter at the same time , and execution is n’t hold up to be as good as a striped RAID shape , obviously . On top of that , you have to buy two 500 GB disk just to get 500 GB of repositing , so it gets a small costly , too . Safety first ! You need at least two disks here .
• RAID 2stripes data like RAID 0 , but at even modest tier ( bite instead of cube ) and uses additional concentrated drives and what ’s calledHamming codefor error trade protection and parity bit which allows it to recoup corrupted data . Guess what ? No one use it any longer , because itrequires a ridiculous number of saucer .
• RAID 3stripes data across multiple drivesas well , but at the byte degree , and it has a single disk dedicated to data parity and error correction . Because of the byte horizontal surface split , all the drive work together at the same time as one unit , which means it can only do one one read or write cognitive process at a clip . Pretty rare to see , and nothing you , Joe Q. Consumer have to worry about . It ’s sound for high transference rates ( again , HD video redaction comes to mind ) with a measure of surety that you do n’t get with RAID 0 , since you could lose a disk and still be okay . You need at least three magnetic disk for this party .
• RAID 4 is astriping+parity disksetup too , but at the larger pulley level , so disks can be more independent , and you may have multiple read procedure in different places going on . Since you ’re only using a single phonograph record for parity , which has to be written to every time you write datum , you may still only have one write surgical procedure run on at a time . Three ’s the magic number of disc here too .
• RAID 5 is where much of the NAS in a boxful action is today if you ’re not roll with RAID 1 , andtries to offerthe dependable of all RAID worlds — operation and redundancy — by fuse the various configurations . It clean information across multiple backbreaking drive , but alternatively of just dumping parity data onto a single drive , it spread it across all of the hard drives too , meaning there ’s no bottleneck from writing parity data . ( Though writing parity data is still kind of a pull . ) In this configuration , you’re able to lose one surd thrust and be okay , since that drive ’s mirror symmetry data point is on a different disk . deplorably , there’ssome concernabout its probability for bankruptcy over the next class as hard drives increase in size and the organisation expands . Three disks get under one’s skin you in the doorway .
• RAID 6is like RAID 5 , but it uses two disk for parity and discipline which are frame-up so that if one of the drive bombs out during data recovery , the system keep on chugging . Obviously , you ask one more disk than RAID 5 , making the minimum four .
• Beyond the stock RAID level , you ’ve also got the multiple : RAID 1 + 0 and 0 + 1 . In RAID 0 + 1 , you take a set of driving that striped in RAID 0 configuration ( so they ’re act like one intemperate drive ) and then you mirror them in a RAID 1 setup , so you get some redundance . So if you ’ve aim a pair of RAID 0 drives , you ’d be mirroring them , for a total of four drive . RAID 1 + 0 is the turnaround : It undress across a set of mirrored parkway . With hard private road puzzle tinny , the United States Army of strong drive you need to make this happen is easier to get going , so you might see more of it .
Just to be light : RAID ’s not a total substitute for backup . For mediocre internet flake multitude , the best way to reckon about RAID is as a way to more reliably store a large bank of data ( which we all have now with photos , videos , music and more ) with extra shelter against forcible hard driveway bankruptcy . you could still all lose an full RAID array via virus or accidentally overwriting it .
If you buy networked storage in a loge , like from Western Digital , you ’ll typically have options for RAID 1 or RAID 5 — which one you break up determine on what ’s more important to you . entire redundancy for more dependableness or a combining of performance and reliability . Lifehacker hasa step - by - footprint guideto building your own RAID array in your computer for some more hands on how to advice , and if you want some supporter plunk your meshing reposition solution , we’vegot you covered theretoo .
https://lifehacker.com/set-up-real-time-bulletproof-backup-drive-redundancy-w-352472
Still something you still wanna cognise ? Send any questions about raids , WoW or hard thing to[email protect ] , with “ Giz Explains ” in the subject line .
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