A.2 comparing raid levels – Galaxy Metal Gear 65 User Manual

Page 112

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Galaxy 65 User Guide

92

A.2 Comparing RAID Levels

Table 1–2

illustrates the differences between the different RAID levels.

Table 1–2

Comparing RAID levels

RAID Level Min No. of

Drives

Description

Strengths

Weaknesses

RAID 0

2

Data striping without
redundancy

Highest performance

No data protection—one drive
fails, all data is lost

RAID 1

2

Disk mirroring

Very high:

Performance

Data protection

Minimal penalty on write
performance

High redundancy cost
overhead—because all data is
duplicated, twice the storage
capacity is required

RAID 2

N/A

No practical use

Previously used for RAM
error environments
correction (known as
Hamming Code) and in disk
drives before the use of
embedded error correction

No practical use—same
performance can be achieved by
RAID 3 at lower cost

RAID 3

3

Block-level data striping
with dedicated parity
drive

Excellent performance for
large, sequential data
requests

Not well-suited for transaction-
oriented network applications;
single parity drive does not
support multiple, concurrent write
requests

RAID 4 (Not
widely used)

3 Block-level

data

striping

with dedicated parity
drive

Data striping supports
multiple simultaneous read
requests

Write requests suffer from same
single parity-drive bottleneck as
RAID 3; RAID 5 offers equal data
protection and better
performance at same cost

RAID 5

3

Block-level data striping
with distributed parity

Best cost/performance for
transaction-oriented
networks; very high
performance and data
protection; supports multiple
simultaneous reads and
writes; can also be optimized
for large, sequential
requests

Write performance is slower than
RAID 0 or RAID 1

RAID 50

6

Combination of RAID 0
(data striping) and
RAID 5 with distributed
parity

Better random performance
and data protection than
RAID 5; supports more
drives than RAID 5

Lower storage capacity than
RAID 5

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