RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a storage configuration that combines multiple drives to improve performance, redundancy, or both. This content covers the core RAID levels—0, 1, 5, 6, and 10—along with hardware versus software implementation and a hands-on Windows Disk Manager demonstration.
RAID Configuration
One way that we can create redundancy with our data is by setting up a RAID configuration.
RAID stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks, or it can mean independent disks. I actually like the second definition better, the independent disks, because some of these drives can actually get quite expensive.
RAID has different configurations, and we would choose different configurations based off of what we're trying to achieve. But essentially what RAID is, is taking multiple drives — whether it's going to be spindle drives like this, the hard disk drives, or maybe it's a solid state drive — and grouping them up to create one drive, or one volume. That volume could look different, so let's take a look at what RAID configurations look like.
RAID 0 is called striping. Striping is when we use multiple drives and split the data across those drives.
For an example, writing to this hard disk drive can be a slow process. We have this spindle that spins around, this arm that's got to find the spot, and then it writes it to this drive. If we're just relying on the single drive, then we can't really speed up the process of writing faster than what this drive can do. However, if we split data across two different drives — that is, we send some of the data across this first drive and some of the data across the second drive — what can happen then is we can speed up the write process and be able to access this data faster. That is what's called striping.
The advantage to this is obviously speed. The disadvantage is that you're not creating any redundancy with this, because the data is split across two different drives, so we don't have any redundancy within the data.
RAID 1 is called mirroring, and what we do with mirroring is just whatever gets written to one drive also gets written to the other drive. It doesn't do anything for speed, it doesn't speed this up, but we do have redundancy now, because we have the same data on two different drives.
RAID 5 gives us both speed and also redundancy. What happens is, first of all we stripe the data across two different drives, so we're splitting up the data across two different drives — that gives us faster write speed — but we also create a parity drive. So then we have a parity bit that goes onto this drive right here, and that allows, if we lose one of these drives, we can then with the parity drive and also this drive over here recreate the data and replace this drive. So it offers some level of redundancy.
One thing to note: three disks on here. We could actually add more disks as well, to create striping across even more disks.
RAID 6 gives us speed with the striping, but also creates two parity drives, so it gives us the opportunity to lose two drives. The striping — we stripe across two disks in this case right here, but we could have more disks, just like with RAID 5 we could add more striping disks to speed up this process. But we have these two drives over here for parity, and then what could happen is we could actually lose two drives out of this group and still be okay and recreate the data using these two parity drives plus the drives that still exist.
There's also RAID 1+0, or RAID 10. What this does is, first of all it has the RAID 0, so we're doing striping: the data that comes in gets striped across two different drives, so it gets split, so we get the speed of splitting. But then these drives get mirrored, so that's the RAID 1 that's happening, mirroring. So now we have redundancy within duplicating the data, but we also have the striping. That's how RAID 10 works.
One thing to note is we can set up a RAID configuration via hardware or software. That is, there are certain hardware components on your computer — maybe it's on your motherboard, or maybe it's a separate controller — that set up the RAID configuration and do all the processing, and there's a lot of advantages to that. But maybe you don't have the hardware that's capable of doing RAID and you want to set it up. Well, there is software RAID as well. For instance, Windows can do a software RAID and set up the RAID configuration.
I'm on my demo machine, and what I'm going to do is open up the start menu and type in disk manager. We're going to just see how we could create a RAID volume in here.
Down here I've got two disks. Here's disk one right here, and if I scroll down there's disk two. These are the two disks I'm going to do. I'm going to right click on this, and notice now I have a new spanned volume, new striped volume, new mirrored volume, and RAID 5 — I can't do RAID 5 because I don't have a third drive right now installed on here. So I'm just going to do a mirror drive.
Let's do a mirror drive. I'm going to click on new mirror and then go through the process. I'm going to select the second disk here, so now I've got the two disks. The size of it — notice that the size, if we were striped, it would actually double the amount of size that we have, or add the two drives up rather, but since this is mirrored it's not going to give us any more. So I'm going to click on next. And which drive do I want it mounted as? Well, E is fine, so we'll do that. Then the formatting process — I'm going to just call this the data drive, so we'll select that, next, and finished.
Now what it's going to do is create a new volume that's going to be that mirrored drive. It gives me a little warning about converting it to a dynamic disk, which is fine, so I'm going to click on yes to do that. Now what we see here is it's still showing two disks down here in the bottom part of this, but we see now we have an E drive. When I select the E drive, you can notice that it highlights those two drives down there. So there we have it, we have now a mirrored drive on our machine here.
Note that there are a lot of other RAID configurations that are out there. We hit the main ones that you find out there, and the biggest thing is you don't need to know all of the ins and outs around RAID right now, but just realize that there are these ways that we can either stripe amongst two different drives or mirror two different drives, depending on whether we're trying to increase the amount of speed and space we have of the drives, or whether we want to create redundancy with that drive so if one fails we still have that data.
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