Which RAID for This Volume?

About this interactive

The lesson's choices: RAID 0 gives performance only, because it just stripes. It is rare in the enterprise, where data usually needs redundancy. RAID 1 mirrors. The lesson uses it for the operating system: a couple of small drives, mirrored, so a dead drive is replaced without going to backup. Every write goes to both drives, so it adds no write speed, and the lesson keeps it away from high-volume work like databases. (Reads can come from either drive, so they may be faster.) RAID 5 stripes with single parity: significant data that needs some redundancy and some performance. It needs at least three disks and survives one failure. RAID 6 stripes with two parity sets: database servers and storage area networks with many disks. It needs at least four and survives two failures. The lesson keeps the data on its own volume, apart from the operating system, so a full data volume never brings the OS down.

What you'll learn

Choose RAID 0, 1, 5 or 6 for a server volume from its drive count, its need for performance and the number of failures it has to survive, keeping the operating system on a mirrored pair apart from the data

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

3.4 Explain the importance of resilience and recovery in security architecture.

Key terms

RAID 0: A RAID configuration that stripes data across two or more drives to improve read and write performance, but provides no fault tolerance — losing any one drive loses all data.
RAID 1: A RAID configuration that mirrors identical data simultaneously across two drives, providing full redundancy so that the array continues operating if either drive fails.
RAID 5: A RAID configuration that stripes data and distributed parity across three or more drives, providing read performance gains and the ability to survive the failure of any single drive.
RAID 6: A RAID configuration that stripes data across four or more drives with two independent sets of parity, allowing the array to survive the simultaneous failure of any two drives.

Topics

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