Variety of RAID servers served for you:

Though Raid used to stand for "redundant array of inexpensive disks", now the term has been updated to "redundant array of independent disks". Apparently, RAID is a way of grouping individual physical drives jointly to form one larger drive known as a "RAID set". The advantages associated with RAID are many. A RAID controller can help you recover lost data from parity information. The controller recovers the data that was lost when the drive went bad, by utilizing the parity information stored on the surviving disks in the RAID set.

In a variety of ways, drives can be grouped to form RAID sets. The different methods used to group drives are called "RAID types". These different types of RAID servers are numbered from 0 to 5. The numbers indicate towards the level of RAID being used. Of these levels, RAID levels 0, 1 and 5 are the most common ones.

RAID types can be used together in a variety of combinations. For instance, 2 RAID -0 sets can be created and combined together to form one RAID -1 set. Along with the performance benefits involved with RAID-0, you also get the benefits associated with RAID -1.

The RAID type used by you generally depends on the type of applications run by you on your server. While RAID-0 is the fastest, RAID -1 is the most reliable one. And if you want advantage s and benefits of both, you can go for RAID -5 which is a brilliant combination of both.

The various types of RAID servers are usually used in SAN storage arrays. Not all SAN storage arrays can support all RAID types. It is to be checked by your vendor which is the type of RAID that is available for storage. Some of the important types of RAID servers are described below so as to give you an idea about the uses of each of them.

1. RAID-0: RAID-0 is often called disk "striping". All the data is spread out in parts across all the disks in the RAID set. RAID-0 is associated with great performance, because you are in this process spreading out the chunk of data onto more physical drives. For RAID-0, no parity is generated. Hence, to write data for RAID-0 disks, there is no overhead. Want better performance? Then RAID-0 is the thing you are looking for. However, if it is high availability that you desire, then RAID-0 is not exactly appropriate. This is because parity is not generated for RAID-0 disks. The prerequisite for RAID-0 is tat it requires two physical disks.

1. RAID-1: RAID-1 is called disk mirroring. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that data is written in at least two separate physical disks. And the disks are identical to one another. So, if one disk fails, the other one can be used for the purpose of data recovery. Disk mirroring is functional for the purpose of fast read operations. However, it is slower when it comes to writing disks. This is because data needs to be written twice. RAID-1 too requires at least two physical disks.

1. RAID-5: what is special about RAID-5 is that it uses disk striping with parity. In this case the data is striped across all the disks in the RAID set, along with the parity information which is needed to restore the data in case the disk fails. The most common method used is RAID-5. The main reason behind this is that it strikes a great balance between performance and availability. How RAID-5 from the other two is that it requires at least three physical disks.