Benefits of raid, Higher data security, Fault tolerance – Sony VGX-XL3 User Manual
Page 83: Improved availability, Increased and intergrated capacity, Improved performance
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VGX-XL3 Digital Living System
downtime in the event of a hard disk failure by storing your data on multiple
hard disks.
Note
: Sony recommends using hard disk drives that are identical in size and
manufacture.
Benefits of RAID
The degree that you realize the various benefits listed below depends on the
exact type or level of RAID that you choose. However, you will always get
some combination of the following benefits:
Higher Data Security
Most RAID levels provide protection for the data stored on the array through
the use of redundancy. This means that the data on the array can withstand
the failure of one hard disk (or sometimes more) without any data loss, and
without requiring any data to be restored from backup.
Fault Tolerance
RAID implementations that include redundancy provide you with a more
reliable overall storage system than can be achieved by a single disk. This
means there is a lower chance of the storage system (as a whole) failing due
to hardware failures.
Improved Availability
Availability refers to your data being present and ready to use. A RAID system
improves availability by providing fault tolerance and by providing special
features that allow for recovery from hardware faults without disruption.
Increased and Intergrated Capacity
RAID systems increase capacity by turning a number of smaller drives into a
larger array, thus combining or adding their individual storage capacities
together. This facilitates applications that require large amounts of contiguous
disk space, and also makes disk space management simpler. (However, a
percentage of total capacity is lost to overhead or redundancy in most
implementations.)
Improved Performance
RAID systems improve performance by allowing the controller to take full
advantage of the capabilities of multiple hard disk to get around performance-
limiting issues that plague individual hard disks. Different RAID
implementations improve performance in different ways and to different
degrees, but all improve performance in some way.