The Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disk, also known as RAID, is used to combine two or more physical drives into a single unit that acts like a large hard disk. This allows for the hard disks to work together thus providing faster speeds. There are three main types of RAID organizations, these are RAID0, RAID1, and RAID5.
RAID0 is also called stripped disk. It's when the data is spread over numerous disks that dramatically improves speeds constantly. However, if one of the disks fail then the data on all of the disk is lost and the system crashes. This is better known as redundancy. In RAID0 there isn't any mirroring or any parity. It is best for people who have temporary data and want to access it quickly.
RAID1 is also known as mirroring. Basically its two or more drives that are exact copies of each other in a 1:1 ratio. If one of the drives fails the system will still perform just as fast and there isn't any data loss. The only step needed to be done is to "re-mirror" the data to the replacement drive.
RAID5 requires three or more drives that all the data is spread across except for one. The last drive is used for parity. Parity is when the drive adds up the data bits of the others and records the sum, if odd as a 1 and 0 if even. The benefits of RAID5 is it's fast speeds and reliability. If a drive fails then there is no data loss but the speed is reduced. The IT then must replace the failed drive and allow the system to reconstruct the data on the new disk before another failure occurs.
The Business Environment
RAID systems are used all over in the business world. In fact, nearly every big corporation uses one. The most common is the RAID5 because it is the most reliable. The odds of more than one disk failing at the same time is astronomical. In addition, RAID1 is used a lot more in smaller corporations because of the speeds it offers. It's also much more reliable than RAID0. RAID0 is mostly used in video editing and companies like that because their data is temporary and they don't care about it as much.
Related Article
This site tells about all the different types of RAID systems and how they are used. It is very short and gets to the point so it's a good learning tool. It also distinguishes between the types of each and what types of companies use them.
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