What is Raid?

WHAT IS RAID?

For those who are curious about whether there is a technological product that provides more secure storage for large-scale data than a hard disk, the question of what RAID is becomes quite important. Furthermore, those who encounter issues regarding the scalability of hard drives can find solutions to all their problems in the continuation of this article.

RAID is a data storage and virtualization technology. To have an understanding of virtualization, we recommend reading our article titled ‘Virtualization Solutions’. However, RAID has some differences that set it apart from other virtualization technologies. It provides multiple disk drive components for data backup and performance improvement. It also has the ability to combine with more logical units. Due to these features, the use of this technology is quite widespread today.

Data is distributed to the drives through several paths in accordance with backup and performance measures. These paths are referred to as RAID levels. RAID follows a numbering scheme for these RAID levels, such as RAID 0, RAID 1. Through these RAID levels, the risk of irretrievable read errors on physical drives is minimized.

It is especially needed in situations that require speed. This is because hard drives are crucial for the fast operation of systems. Although the Windows operating system offers many tools for speed optimization, they often fall short. This is due to the fact that each hard drive has a performance capacity and it is not possible for them to exceed their potentials. However, when multiple disks are integrated simultaneously, performance issues can be resolved.

In summary, to increase performance in systems, multiple disks are often brought together. RAID consolidates all these disks in the arrays and achieves a high storage capacity.

What are RAID Levels?

RAID technology has certain levels in its working principle. These levels vary depending on the determination of system factors such as performance and storage space. It is possible to list the most well-known RAID levels.

RAID 0 (Stripe Set): It is a RAID level that requires the use of at least 2 disks. It also has the capacity to operate with up to 32 disks.
RAID 1 (Mirror): 2 disks are used. While the data is written to one disk, the copies are processed to the other disk. The read speed is quite good. However, the write speed is lower compared to the read speed.
RAID 10: At least 4 disks are used. It can operate with up to 32 disks, similar to RAID 0.

Source: What is RAID?