Windows and MacOS X do not seem to have much of a problem with that and both even have a software RAID solution standard available although not often used. The downside of RAID in software is that it performs slower than hardware implementation, although modern solutions perform pretty well, and possibly less reliable compared to a hardware solution.
Your choice can be influenced by quite a few factors and I usually start out with these questions:. For me reliavility is more important than speed anyway, therefor I chose RAID 6 for my configuration.
Note that with all RAID variations, similar sized drives are required. Backups however have the advantage that you can actually resort to older backups if needed. RAID however will not give you that ability. Once something a file is updated on your RAID setup, the data will be [high probability] lost. In RAID 0 data is written in parallel to 2 or more disks. Think of it as writing block 1 to disk 1, block 2 to disk 2, block 3 to disk 3 etc.
Another advantage is that all of the storage capacity will be available for storage. CON : The big downside is lack of reliability. If one disk crashes all data is gone, as half of the information will be lost. RAID 1 arrays mirror de data of one drive to another drive. So when your computer writes data to the array, the controller will actually write the data twice: to disk 1 and to disk 2. PRO : Increased reliability since data is always saved in duplicate on two different drives.
If one drive dies, the other will still be able to provide you the data. CON : Not very efficient when it comes to remaining storage , as you need at least two the same drives, but in the end only have the storage space of only one drive.
RAID 2 uses striping on bit level, which theoretical could come with very high transfer rates speed. However, at this point there are no commercial applications available that utilize RAID 2.
Minimum number of required drives : 3 drives. PRO : Possibly very high transfer speeds. Think of it as data being written as follows: block 1 goes to drive 1, block 2 to drive 2, block 3 to drive 3 and a calculated parity to drive 4. PRO : Data reliability is good. RAID 5 works in essence the same as RAID 4 block level , but instead of storing all the parity blocks on one drive, the parity blocks are evenly spread out over all drives. PRO : Very good data reliability and good performance.
It actually maintains 2 parity calculations, and like RAID 5 these are equally distributed offering the ability to even recover from 2 failing drives. PRO : Good speed performance, and higher reliability. RAID 6 — Striping with double distributed parity. These variations can offer additional speed and reliability but typically at the expensive of storage space.
However these variations are typically not used in regular home settings. You can configure your own fitting your own needs. With JBOD, basically hard-disks are stringed in a sequence, offering the sum of the capacities of all hard-disks in the string. There is no speed gain here, and when a drive fails in a JBOD the not all data is lost, only the data on the defective drive.
And should you use RAID for data storage and backups? There are a number of RAID levels , each of which offers different advantages. RAID devices are plentiful. You can get large devices that hold five drives, from Drobo and LaCie , which are often Mac-ready out of the box, as well as smaller two-drive devices for RAID levels 0 and 1; see below from a variety of vendors. Network-attached storage NAS devices can also be RAID arrays, and large data systems, such as object storage, use a similar though more sophisticated technology.
Choose a RAID level, and drag and drop drive sizes to see how much storage space you get. You can also use software RAID, where an operating system or additional application offers support for this technology.
Nonetheless, using your computer to manage a RAID array means that its CPU will have to do a lot of work, so this is only practical if you have a computer that is only storing files.
A system set to RAID 10 yields half the total capacity of all the drives in the array. Spanning is the combination of drives in a linear fashion to create one large logical volume. The advantage of using this mode is that you can add more drives without having to reformat the system.
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