This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of employ.

RAID-Array-Feature

It'due south difficult to understate the impact of NAND flash and SSDs. Over the last decade, these storage solutions take transformed the unabridged market place. But long before we had massive solid-state storage, nosotros had a unlike method of improving organization operation and response fourth dimension: RAID. The venerable storage system turned 30 yesterday and it'due south still widely used in enterprise and server solutions.

The people who invented RAID, David Patterson, Garth Gibson, and Randy Katz, start defined the concept in 1987, followed by a formal newspaper in 1988. Specific concepts like mirroring had been divers a decade previously, but RAID didn't just allow for a mirrored solution. It too provided a blueprint for dramatically accelerating disk performance by striping data across multiple drives at the aforementioned fourth dimension.

Patterson, Gibson, and Katz defined a diversity of RAID levels to suit diverse tasks and strategies. Today, RAID 2 and RAID 3 are rarely used, while motherboards typically offer software RAID back up for RAID 0, RAID one, and RAID 10. Some boards and controllers also support RAID 5. RAID 0 is data-striping only–you go the advantage of writing data to two disks at one time (boosting performance), only you increase the chance of catastrophically losing data. If each drive has a ane percent take a chance of failure (but equally an instance), then the chances of losing a drive and all of your data is 4 percent, since whatsoever failure will impale the array. RAID i is mirroring–all of the information on Bulldoze 0 is simultaneously written to Bulldoze 1. This protects information, but offers no performance improvements. RAID 10 (1+0) combines the two methods, equally shown beneath:

Raid10-Image1

RAID offered a fashion for small disks to match or exceed the standard mainframe disks of the same era. IBM's 3380 offered a whopping 7.5GB of storage in 1987, merely a price tag in the neighborhood of six figures could give you a spontaneous ulcer. The entire idea behind RAID was to develop a system storage array that could match IBM's functioning and reliability for vastly less coin.

Why RAID Mattered

But RAID didn't but offering 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's VelociRaptor 600 family could even edge out an SSD from the aforementioned fourth dimension menstruation.

StorageReview-Image2

RAID arrays didn't always meliorate performance, and there were definite drawbacks. AMD users were oft badly bitten by a problems in VIA'due south 686b southbridge that could cause critical and irreversible data loss when the system also contained a Creative soundcard. Only at the fourth dimension, these drawbacks were often considered an acceptable hazard. CPU clock speeds had been leaping ahead for decades, while storage functioning grew at a much slower rate. When combine with other methods of boosting performance, similar short-stroking the drive (using but the inner area), RAID arrays offered the best performance yous could buy.

Hat tip to ITProportal for recognizing the anniversary.

Now read: How Do SSDs Piece of work?