Dell NX046 manual RAID Level

Intel RAID configuration program. If you have three drives and two are in a RAID level 1 configuration, the third drive can be used as a spare drive for the RAID configuration (see "Creating a Spare Hard Drive" on page 60). A RAID level 5 array must be made up of three drives.

All drives must be the same type of drive; SAS and SATA drives cannot be mixed in a RAID array. The drives should also be the same size to ensure that the larger drive does not contain unallocated (and therefore unusable) space.

RAID Level 0

RAID level 0 uses a storage technique known as "data striping" to provide a high data access rate. Data striping is a method of writing consecutive segments—or stripes—of data sequentially across the physical drives to create a large virtual drive. Data striping allows one of the drives to read data while the other drive is searching for and reading the next block.

serial ATA RAID configured for RAID level 0

segment 1

segment 3

segment 5

hard drive 1

segment 2

segment 4

segment 6

hard drive 2

Another advantage of a RAID level 0 configuration is that it utilizes the full capacities of the drives. If you have two 120-GB drives installed, you have 240 GB on which to store data.

NOTICE: Because RAID level 0 provides no data redundancy, if one drive fails, then the data on the other drive is also inaccessible. Therefore, ensure that you perform regular backups when you use a RAID level 0 configuration.

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