I keep hearing these over and over but I never did quite get how it works since the number is different and it does different thing apparently and wikipedia is quite not explaining it’s benefits and downsides. So Could someone explain how these raid systems work.
In: Technology
RAID is a way to make a single big virtual disk out of several smaller disks. This is both to increase the size of the file system you can put on it and also to provide redundancy in case a disk fails. The numbers are used to distinguish between different types of RAID configurations. RAID 0 just gives you a bigger faster disk by doing so called striping. This is when you store the odd data blocks on the first disk and the even on the second disk. So you get double the performance and double the space but if one disk fails all your data is lost. RAID 1 gives you full redundancy by storing the exact same data on both disks using mirroring. So if you lose one disk all your data is on the other disk. The performance is a bit more complex and can range from half the performance to double the performance on two disks depending on the configuration and the operation. RAID 5 is used for three or more disks and use striping like RAID 0 but will also store a parity or checksum of every stripe. If you lose one disk then you can recreate the data on it using the data on the other disks. This gives you both more space and some redundancy and is kind of compromise between RAID 0 and RAID 1. Then there is RAID 6 which is the same as RAID 5 but now with two parity so you can lose two disks without losing data but also costs you two disks worth of space. RAID 10 is a combination of 0 and 1 where you both stripe and mirror the data. You get the capacity of half your disks and the redundancy of the other half.
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