CHAPTER 3: Setting Up and Getting Started

RAID 5 stripes both data and parity information across multiple drives. Striping across drives improves overall performance, and the parity information provides data protection. Because of the error-correction capabilities, if a drive fails, the data can be quickly and automatically fixed.

RAID 5

A1

A2

AP

B1

BP

B2

CP

C1

C2

RAID 10 (also called RAID 1+0 or RAID 1&0) contains sets of RAID 1 mirrors acting as drives within a RAID 0 striping array. With this setup, the array could survive one drive failure in each mirror array.

 

RAID 0

RAID 1

RAID 1

A

A

B

B

C

C

D

D

E

E

F

F

Drawback

A RAID 5 array is treated as one drive with the capacity of all but one of the drives added together.

RAID 10 treats the entire array as a single drive with the storage capacity of the smallest drive × 2. So if you have four drives (350 GB, 300 GB, 250 GB, and 200 GB) in a RAID 10 array, your computer recognizes a single drive with 400 GB total capacity.

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