Promise Technology SX8300, SX4300 user manual Choosing a RAID Level, Advantages Disadvantages

Chapter 5: Concepts

Choosing a RAID Level

There are several issues to consider when choosing the RAID Level for your FastTrak logical drive. The following discussion summarizes some advantages, disadvantages and applications for each choice.

RAID 0

Advantages	Disadvantages
Implements a striped disk logical drive,	Not a true RAID because it is not fault-
the data is broken down into blocks and	tolerant
each block is written to a separate disk	The failure of just one drive will result in
drive	all data in an logical drive being lost
I/O performance is greatly improved by
	Should not be used in mission critical
spreading the I/O load across many	environments
channels and drives
No parity calculation overhead is
involved

Recommended Applications for RAID 0

•Image Editing

•Pre-Press Applications

•Any application requiring high bandwidth

RAID 1

Advantages	Disadvantages
Simplest RAID storage subsystem	Very high disk overhead - uses only
design	50% of total capacity
Can increase read performance by
processing data requests in parallel
since the same data resides on two
different drives

Recommended Applications for RAID 1

•Accounting

•Payroll

•Financial

•Any application requiring very high availability

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