RAID

Information has become a commodity in today's world, and protecting that information has become mission critical. The Internet has helped push this information age forward. Popular websites process so much information, that any type of slowdown or downtime can mean the loss of millions of dollars. Clearly, just a bunch of hard disks won't be able to cut it anymore. So Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks (RAID) was developed to increase the performance and reliability of data storage by spreading data across multiple drives. RAID technology has grown and evolved throughout the years to meet these ever-growing demands for speed and data security.A technique was developed to provide speed, reliability, and increased storage capacity using multiple disks, rather than single disk solutions. RAID takes multiple hard drives and allows them to be used as one large hard drive with benefits depending on the scheme or level of RAID being used.

The better the RAID implementation, the more expensive it is. There is no one best RAID implementation. Some implementations are better than others depending upon the actual application. It used to be that RAID was only available in expensive server systems. However, with the advent of inexpensive RAID controllers, it seems it has pretty much reached the mainstream market.A drive array is a collection of hard disk drives that are grouped together. When we talk about RAID, there is often a distinction between physical drives and arrays and logical drives and arrays.

Physical arrays can be divided or grouped together to form one or more logical arrays. These logical arrays can be divided into logical drives that the operating system sees. The logical drives are treated as single hard drives and can be partitioned and formatted accordingly.The RAID controller is what manages how the data is stored and accessed across the physical and logical arrays. It ensures that the operating system sees the logical drives only and need not worry about managing the underlying schema. As far as the system is concerned, it is dealing with regular hard drives.