Sony VGX-XL3 manual Benefits of RAID, Higher Data Security

downtime in the event of a hard disk failure by storing your data on multiple hard disks.

Note: Sony recommends using hard disk drives that are identical in size and manufacture.

Benefits of RAID

The degree that you realize the various benefits listed below depends on the exact type or level of RAID that you choose. However, you will always get some combination of the following benefits:

Higher Data Security

Most RAID levels provide protection for the data stored on the array through the use of redundancy. This means that the data on the array can withstand the failure of one hard disk (or sometimes more) without any data loss, and without requiring any data to be restored from backup.

Fault Tolerance

RAID implementations that include redundancy provide you with a more reliable overall storage system than can be achieved by a single disk. This means there is a lower chance of the storage system (as a whole) failing due to hardware failures.

Improved Availability

Availability refers to your data being present and ready to use. A RAID system improves availability by providing fault tolerance and by providing special features that allow for recovery from hardware faults without disruption.

Increased and Intergrated Capacity

RAID systems increase capacity by turning a number of smaller drives into a larger array, thus combining or adding their individual storage capacities together. This facilitates applications that require large amounts of contiguous disk space, and also makes disk space management simpler. (However, a percentage of total capacity is lost to overhead or redundancy in most implementations.)

Improved Performance

RAID systems improve performance by allowing the controller to take full advantage of the capabilities of multiple hard disk to get around performance- limiting issues that plague individual hard disks. Different RAID implementations improve performance in different ways and to different degrees, but all improve performance in some way.

80 VGX-XL3 Digital Living System