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RAID-Array-Feature

It'due south hard to understate the bear on of NAND wink and SSDs. Over the last decade, these storage solutions accept transformed the entire market place. But long before nosotros had massive solid-state storage, nosotros had a dissimilar method of improving organisation operation and response time: RAID. The venerable storage organization turned 30 yesterday and it's all the same widely used in enterprise and server solutions.

The people who invented RAID, David Patterson, Garth Gibson, and Randy Katz, get-go defined the concept in 1987, followed by a formal paper in 1988. Specific concepts like mirroring had been defined a decade previously, but RAID didn't merely allow for a mirrored solution. It too provided a blueprint for dramatically accelerating deejay operation by striping data beyond multiple drives at the same time.

Patterson, Gibson, and Katz divers a variety of RAID levels to suit diverse tasks and strategies. Today, RAID 2 and RAID 3 are rarely used, while motherboards typically offer software RAID support for RAID 0, RAID one, and RAID 10. Some boards and controllers also support RAID 5. RAID 0 is data-striping only–you get the reward of writing data to two disks at once (boosting functioning), but you increment the adventure of catastrophically losing data. If each drive has a one per centum chance of failure (only as an instance), and so the chances of losing a bulldoze and all of your information is 4 percent, since any failure will kill the array. RAID 1 is mirroring–all of the data on Bulldoze 0 is simultaneously written to Drive ane. This protects data, but offers no performance improvements. RAID 10 (1+0) combines the two methods, as shown below:

Raid10-Image1

RAID offered a way for small disks to friction match or exceed the standard mainframe disks of the aforementioned era. IBM's 3380 offered a whopping 7.5GB of storage in 1987, but a price tag in the neighborhood of six figures could give y'all a spontaneous ulcer. The entire idea behind RAID was to develop a system storage array that could match IBM's performance and reliability for vastly less money.

Why RAID Mattered

But RAID didn't just offer performance improvements at the enterprise level, it had real benefits for consumers as well. Equally the graph below from StorageReview.com shows, a RAID 0 array built from Western Digital'due south VelociRaptor 600 family could even border out an SSD from the same fourth dimension menstruum.

StorageReview-Image2

RAID arrays didn't always improve performance, and at that place were definite drawbacks. AMD users were often desperately bitten by a problems in VIA'southward 686b southbridge that could crusade disquisitional and irreversible information loss when the system also contained a Creative soundcard. Simply at the time, these drawbacks were often considered an acceptable risk. CPU clock speeds had been leaping ahead for decades, while storage performance grew at a much slower rate. When combine with other methods of boosting performance, similar short-stroking the drive (using merely the inner area), RAID arrays offered the best performance you could buy.

Hat tip to ITProportal for recognizing the anniversary.

Now read: How Do SSDs Work?