Working on my COMPTIA A+ Cert. and I came across this topic. While I understand how it works, I don’t understand why you would use it over individual drives?
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RAID provides two primary advantages, and 3 technically but the 3rd isn’t as big a deal
1. increased performance – Having multiple drives in an array allows you to leverage the performance of all of those drives, so you get much faster read and write speeds. There’s a performance penalty associated with RAID so you don’t get 100% of the performance of all the drives, particularly RAID 5+6, but overall there’s a gain in performance.
2. Redundancy – RAID allows you to lose 1 or more drives in an Array (depending on the RAID level) without losing any data. Most RAID arrays allow for drives to be hot-swapped or replaced and the array rebuilt live without downtime. For big business this is critical as it allows the server to continue operating without data loss while it is repaired.
3. Useable Space – Having drives in an array means that you can manage it as one large block of storage, which is much more efficient than trying to manage multiple independent drives.
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