a short and sweet guide to RAID
There are many different levels of RAID, what I intend to do here is explain the most popular levels of RAID. which I believe to be RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 6. I will also discus RAID 0, and exactly why this is not actually a RAID level.
as it is useful, I will also explain the concepts of RAID 1+0.
RAID means Redundant Array of Independent Disks
Basically, using RAID is a way to mitigate the effects of a a hardware failure.
In each case what using RAID does, is extend data across multiple disks, with a view that should one disk fail, you'd be able to recover the data from the remaining disks without going through the trouble of sending the drives off to a data recovery company.
RAID 0, (striped disks)
In RAID 0 you must have at least 2 drives, however you can feasibly have any number of drives up to the limit that your controller will support. Ideally your drives must be of the same size, though that is not a definite requirement, however, if your drives are not the same size you will loose some of the capacity of the bigger drive.
the first term that you will need to understand is a stripe, a stripe is simply a block of data on a disk.
so in the above example the block size on the disk is 17 bytes. so that's the size of a stripe.
With RAID 0 each one of these stripes is written to a separate disk
imagine a two disk example disk 1 on the left, disk 2 on the right.
you can also see that where as when all the data was written on one disk it filled the disk (which was only ten lines big), by spreading the data across 2 disks, there is an effective doubling of capacity.
This is why disks must be equal size, is disk 1 can only contain 10 lines, but disk 2 is twice as big, then the RAID can only use as much space as it can equally allocate between the disks.
you can also see that if one disk dies we'll be left with this:
basically, lots of corrupt files,
RAID means redundant array of independent disks, whist the disks in RAID 0 are an array of independent disks, there is no redundant hardware.
Incidentally if you would like to make 1 large volume from two different sized disks then you should investigate extending the volume.
What are the pro's of RAID0?
Makes bigger volumes
Faster read and write times as data can be read or written from two independent disks, (almost doubling the read/write time with two disks, tripling with three disks).
you can have any number of disks.
What are the cons of RAID 0?
It's not redundant, loosing 1 disk means loosing all the data
The more disks that you have, the more likely it is that your array will die sooner rather than later.
Probability of failure.
whilst of course there may be somewhere in the world a RAID 0array with fifty disks that has never failed, and yet plenty of 2 disk arrays that have failed.
Failure is never assured, but neither is it assured that the disk will keep running.
think of it this way, if the likelihood of a disk failing is 1 in a million. when you have two disks the likelihood of either one failing is 2 in one million.
if you have 20 disks, it's ten time more likely that one disk will fail and you'll loose all the data than if you had two disks. in a RAID 0 array a single failure means a complete loss of data, for this reason it's generally not advisable to use RAID 0, unless you really understand that you're likely to lose data, but you really require the increases in performance that this RAID level offers.
RAID 1 (mirrored set)
in RAID 1 you have to have to have at least 2 disks, however you can have three or more disks. with RAID 1 there is no increase in usable space of capacity. there is no striping, data is not divided into stripes. data is mirrored at a disk level.
again a visual example, disk 1 on the left, disk 2 on the right
you can see that whatever is written to disk 1 is also written to disk 2
if there are three disks the same data is written to all three disks
if one disk fails, then you can see that you can still read data from another disk, if you have 3 disks in a RAID 1 array then 2 disks could fail and you would still be able to access your data.
Pro's
Fast access to data, you can read simultaneously from as many disks as you have in your array, if you have 5 disks, you can read data five times as quickly.
it is fault tolerant, a disk can fail, and you won't loose any data.
con's
waste of disks, if you've got an array of two disks, you're effectively wasting the space of one of them, if you've got three disks, you're wasting two of them. -though at the benefit of two disks being able to fail at once.
RAID 1+0 (mirrored striped)
RAID 1+0 expands on the concepts above. you must have at least four disks to create a RAID 1+0 array.
Basically what this will do is create 1 set of 2 disks where data is striped across the two disks, and then also mirror that data to a second set of stripped disks.
Moving on from here, you're going to need to have that data stripe theory right in your mind.
you'll also need to be able to grasp what parity is.
Parity is something really clever, that can be explained really simply.
you can see that the problem with just mirroring (RAID 1) a piece of data is that it's incredibly inefficient. it also is restrictive in terms of volume size. if you've got 2 100GB disks, in order to have a 200GB array you have to throw away both 100GB disks and add 2 200GB disks.
How Parity Works:
I'm going to explain bit level parity using the example of 3 bits, then I'll expand to larger bit sizes so you can see how well it scales.
with parity, you always loose a bit, or in this example of RAID arrays a disk to parity.
a parity bit is a bit that would enable you to work out what you're missing if a disk fails in this example there are 2 disks for data, and one disk (or bit) for parity
if you look above you can see that the disk has a series of data written to it. in order to calculate the parity, all you do is add up the amount of 1's that are written to the disk, if it's an odd amount you write 0, if it's an even amount you write 1, (and for the sake of parity, 0 is an even number)
no imaging that disk 1 fails
thankfully, because you have a parity bit you can calculate what it's meant to be
whilst the disk has failed, you can still see what was on the disk by virtue of the fact that you can calculate it, you can put a new disk into this array, and the data that was on the disk can be recalculated from the parity bit, and re-written to the new disk, as if nothing ever happened whilst it may not be immediately clear, parity can work on any number of disks
from this you can see that as you add disks to the array, you increase the size of the array, not only that but a disk (any disk) can fail, (1 at a time!) and your data is still safe.
whilst I didn't say at the start, any number of disks, but with a dedicated disk reserved for recording parity information is RAID 3, or RAID 4.
RAID 3 works at byte level, RAID 4 works at disk block level.
the exact parity method isn't as described above, -that's just a really simple example to make it easy to understand that it's possible to use just a single disk to protect an array of many other disks
RAID 5 (Distributed Parity)
RAID 5 works almost exactly like RAID 4, you must have at least 3 disks, and will always loose the space of 1 disk to parity.
if you have 3 100GB disks you'd have 200GB of space, (200GB of data 100GB of parity information)
if you had 10 100GB disks you'd have 900GB of space (900GB of data 100GB of parity)
basically, RAID 5 differs from RAID 3 in that instead of having a disk dedicated to Parity, the parity block is spread around the disks,
where D = data and P = parity, the disks will look like this
RAID 3, RAID 4 and RAID 5 all have increased read rates as data is read from multiple disks, both suffer from reduce write rates, due to the extra time taken to process the parity bit.
RAID 5, like RAID 4 will allow for any one disk in the array to fail.
RAID 6, is a lot like raid 5 in that there is parity, and the parity blocks are spread across all the disks, however, RAID 6 uses proprietary methods for calculating the partity, and stored parity information on 2 disks in the array.
this means that an array of 15 100GB disks would not have 1500GB space it'd actually only have 1300GB of space that'd be 200GB of parity information.
For this reason to get the best protection and efficiency RAID 6 is best used with large arrays, (12 disks or greater), and the proprietor calculations mean that hardware acceleration is almost essential.
RAID + RAID.
It is possible, either through the use of specialist hardware controllers, that support this feature, or a mix of hardware controllers and software configuration. to effectively multiple RAID levels.
it was mentioned earlier that RAID 1+0 was a possible configuration, through really requires 4 disks, and at least 2 extra disks added each time the array needs to be expanded.
The same is true of other RAID levels, you can have the protection of a Level, and add a second layer of protection on top of that. (which is better for very large arrays).
for example there may be twenty disks, each disk might be 1TB
a RAID 0 array is very attractive, 20TB of space in total, but it's twenty times more likely to fail than if there was a single really big disk, (even though such a disk doesn't really exist). Basically, a RAID 0 array is a bad choice, it's very likely to fail.
a RAID 1 array is a terrible choice, you'd get a 1TB disk, mirrored to 19 other disks! a massive waste of hardware!
A RAID 4, or 5 array is a possibility, at least at this point you're going to have 19 of your 20 1TB drives essentially added together, but with 20 disks in your array, it's likely that there may be multiple failures.
so really this leaves 3 possible options...
You use RAID 5, but you allocate one drive as a hot swap drive, this means that the drive sits unused until another drive fails and it's needed
This is a RAID 5 array.
how Imagine that drive 3 fails, the Hot spare takes over, and the array is rebuilt onto that drive. then when drive 3 is replaced, either the array will rebuild onto that drive leaving disk 8 as the hot spare again, or drive 3 will become the hot spare until such a time as another disk fails. then it'd assume that responsibility.
in the case of this example, clearly you'd have 20 1TB disks, 1 is taken away for hot spare, 1 is taken away for Parity, you'd have an 18TB array.
either the hot spare, or one of the disks in the array could fail. at the same time(!)
You could also use use RAID 6,
this will lead to you having an 18TB array (18 data drives, 2 parity disks), you have better fault resistance because there are 2 Parity disks but there will be an increase in the time taken to write data to the disks. due to the fact that the parity has to be calculated using a complicated mechanism at each data write.
Lastly, you could have raid 5+0.
What this means is that you'd have 2 arrays, each would have 10 disks, arranged in a RAID 5 array, (9 data disks, 1 Parity disk) each array would be 9TB
then you add these disks together using a RAID 0 array.
This would give you a fairly well protected array, (any one disk from either array could fail) -you could have 2 disks failed at once, just one from either array...
you also get the added benefit of the increased read speed. (would be the same speed as RAID 6 as data is being read from 18 individual spindles), but the write operations would be faster as the parity calculation is easier, (unless you have hardware acceleration for RAID 6 calculations).
Any questions, then feel free to ask.
RAID 2 is intentionally omitted because practically nobody uses it.
There are many different levels of RAID, what I intend to do here is explain the most popular levels of RAID. which I believe to be RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 6. I will also discus RAID 0, and exactly why this is not actually a RAID level.
as it is useful, I will also explain the concepts of RAID 1+0.
RAID means Redundant Array of Independent Disks
Basically, using RAID is a way to mitigate the effects of a a hardware failure.
In each case what using RAID does, is extend data across multiple disks, with a view that should one disk fail, you'd be able to recover the data from the remaining disks without going through the trouble of sending the drives off to a data recovery company.
RAID 0, (striped disks)
In RAID 0 you must have at least 2 drives, however you can feasibly have any number of drives up to the limit that your controller will support. Ideally your drives must be of the same size, though that is not a definite requirement, however, if your drives are not the same size you will loose some of the capacity of the bigger drive.
the first term that you will need to understand is a stripe, a stripe is simply a block of data on a disk.
Code:
01) if you image that
02) this sentence is
03) a piece of data,
04) then you can see
05) how it has been d
06) ivided into 10 eq
07) ual strips (repre
08) sented by a new l
09) ine) each 17 char
10) ectors in length.
With RAID 0 each one of these stripes is written to a separate disk
imagine a two disk example disk 1 on the left, disk 2 on the right.
Code:
01) if you image that this sentence is
02) a piece of data, then you can see
03) how it has been d ivided into 10 eq
04) ual strips (repre sented by a new l
05) ine) each 17 char ectors in length.
06)
07)
08)
09)
10)
you can also see that where as when all the data was written on one disk it filled the disk (which was only ten lines big), by spreading the data across 2 disks, there is an effective doubling of capacity.
This is why disks must be equal size, is disk 1 can only contain 10 lines, but disk 2 is twice as big, then the RAID can only use as much space as it can equally allocate between the disks.
you can also see that if one disk dies we'll be left with this:
Code:
01) if you image that
02) a piece of data,
03) how it has been d
04) ual strips (repre
05) ine) each 17 char
06)
07)
08)
09)
10)
basically, lots of corrupt files,
RAID means redundant array of independent disks, whist the disks in RAID 0 are an array of independent disks, there is no redundant hardware.
Incidentally if you would like to make 1 large volume from two different sized disks then you should investigate extending the volume.
What are the pro's of RAID0?
Makes bigger volumes
Faster read and write times as data can be read or written from two independent disks, (almost doubling the read/write time with two disks, tripling with three disks).
you can have any number of disks.
What are the cons of RAID 0?
It's not redundant, loosing 1 disk means loosing all the data
The more disks that you have, the more likely it is that your array will die sooner rather than later.
Probability of failure.
whilst of course there may be somewhere in the world a RAID 0array with fifty disks that has never failed, and yet plenty of 2 disk arrays that have failed.
Failure is never assured, but neither is it assured that the disk will keep running.
think of it this way, if the likelihood of a disk failing is 1 in a million. when you have two disks the likelihood of either one failing is 2 in one million.
if you have 20 disks, it's ten time more likely that one disk will fail and you'll loose all the data than if you had two disks. in a RAID 0 array a single failure means a complete loss of data, for this reason it's generally not advisable to use RAID 0, unless you really understand that you're likely to lose data, but you really require the increases in performance that this RAID level offers.
RAID 1 (mirrored set)
in RAID 1 you have to have to have at least 2 disks, however you can have three or more disks. with RAID 1 there is no increase in usable space of capacity. there is no striping, data is not divided into stripes. data is mirrored at a disk level.
again a visual example, disk 1 on the left, disk 2 on the right
Code:
01) data goes here 01) data goes here
02) more goes here 02) more goes here
03) even more data 03) even more data
if there are three disks the same data is written to all three disks
Code:
01) data goes here 01) data goes here 01) data goes here
02) more goes here 02) more goes here 02) more goes here
03) even more data 03) even more data 03) even more data
Pro's
Fast access to data, you can read simultaneously from as many disks as you have in your array, if you have 5 disks, you can read data five times as quickly.
it is fault tolerant, a disk can fail, and you won't loose any data.
con's
waste of disks, if you've got an array of two disks, you're effectively wasting the space of one of them, if you've got three disks, you're wasting two of them. -though at the benefit of two disks being able to fail at once.
RAID 1+0 (mirrored striped)
RAID 1+0 expands on the concepts above. you must have at least four disks to create a RAID 1+0 array.
Basically what this will do is create 1 set of 2 disks where data is striped across the two disks, and then also mirror that data to a second set of stripped disks.
Moving on from here, you're going to need to have that data stripe theory right in your mind.
you'll also need to be able to grasp what parity is.
Parity is something really clever, that can be explained really simply.
you can see that the problem with just mirroring (RAID 1) a piece of data is that it's incredibly inefficient. it also is restrictive in terms of volume size. if you've got 2 100GB disks, in order to have a 200GB array you have to throw away both 100GB disks and add 2 200GB disks.
How Parity Works:
I'm going to explain bit level parity using the example of 3 bits, then I'll expand to larger bit sizes so you can see how well it scales.
with parity, you always loose a bit, or in this example of RAID arrays a disk to parity.
a parity bit is a bit that would enable you to work out what you're missing if a disk fails in this example there are 2 disks for data, and one disk (or bit) for parity
Code:
1 2 P
=======
0 0
0 1
1 0
1 1
if you look above you can see that the disk has a series of data written to it. in order to calculate the parity, all you do is add up the amount of 1's that are written to the disk, if it's an odd amount you write 0, if it's an even amount you write 1, (and for the sake of parity, 0 is an even number)
Code:
1 2 P
=======
0 0 0 (there are no 1's, 0 is an even number so write 0 for parity)
0 1 1 (there is one 1, it's an odd number so the parity bit is 1)
1 0 1 (one 1 means an odd number of 1's, so the parity bit is 1)
1 1 0 (2 ones, 2 is an even number so the parity bit is 0)
no imaging that disk 1 fails
Code:
1 2 P
=======
? 0 0
? 1 1
? 0 1
? 1 0
Code:
1 2 P
=======
? 0 0 (well there was an even number of ones when the data was written, and disk 2 is a 0, so disk 1 can't be a one, it must be a 0)
? 1 1 (parity bit = 1, so there must have been an odd number of 1's, disk 2 is a 1, so disk 2 must have been a 0)
? 0 1 (parity bit = 1, so there must have been an odd number of 1's, disk 2 is a 0, so disk 1 must have been a 1)
? 1 0 (parity bit = 0, so there must have been an even number of 1's, disk 2 is a 1, so disk 1 must have also been a 1)
Code:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 P
==================
1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 (there are six ones, it's an even number so the parity bit is 0)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 P
==================
1 1 ? 1 0 1 0 1 0 as the parity bit is a 0, you know that there were an even number of ones, disk 3 has failed leaving an odd number, so now you know that there must have been a 1 on that disk.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 P
==================
1 1 1 1 0 1 ? 1 0 as the parity bit is a 0, you know that there was an even number of ones, disk 7 failed, but since you know that there are 6 1's in the remaining disks, and there were an even number of 1's that the data on disk 7 must have been a zero.
whilst I didn't say at the start, any number of disks, but with a dedicated disk reserved for recording parity information is RAID 3, or RAID 4.
RAID 3 works at byte level, RAID 4 works at disk block level.
the exact parity method isn't as described above, -that's just a really simple example to make it easy to understand that it's possible to use just a single disk to protect an array of many other disks
Code:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 P
==================
01) 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0
02) 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1
03) 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0
RAID 5 (Distributed Parity)
RAID 5 works almost exactly like RAID 4, you must have at least 3 disks, and will always loose the space of 1 disk to parity.
if you have 3 100GB disks you'd have 200GB of space, (200GB of data 100GB of parity information)
if you had 10 100GB disks you'd have 900GB of space (900GB of data 100GB of parity)
basically, RAID 5 differs from RAID 3 in that instead of having a disk dedicated to Parity, the parity block is spread around the disks,
where D = data and P = parity, the disks will look like this
Code:
1 2 3
============
01) D D P
02) D P D
03) P D D
04) D D P
RAID 5, like RAID 4 will allow for any one disk in the array to fail.
RAID 6, is a lot like raid 5 in that there is parity, and the parity blocks are spread across all the disks, however, RAID 6 uses proprietary methods for calculating the partity, and stored parity information on 2 disks in the array.
this means that an array of 15 100GB disks would not have 1500GB space it'd actually only have 1300GB of space that'd be 200GB of parity information.
For this reason to get the best protection and efficiency RAID 6 is best used with large arrays, (12 disks or greater), and the proprietor calculations mean that hardware acceleration is almost essential.
RAID + RAID.
It is possible, either through the use of specialist hardware controllers, that support this feature, or a mix of hardware controllers and software configuration. to effectively multiple RAID levels.
it was mentioned earlier that RAID 1+0 was a possible configuration, through really requires 4 disks, and at least 2 extra disks added each time the array needs to be expanded.
The same is true of other RAID levels, you can have the protection of a Level, and add a second layer of protection on top of that. (which is better for very large arrays).
for example there may be twenty disks, each disk might be 1TB
a RAID 0 array is very attractive, 20TB of space in total, but it's twenty times more likely to fail than if there was a single really big disk, (even though such a disk doesn't really exist). Basically, a RAID 0 array is a bad choice, it's very likely to fail.
a RAID 1 array is a terrible choice, you'd get a 1TB disk, mirrored to 19 other disks! a massive waste of hardware!
A RAID 4, or 5 array is a possibility, at least at this point you're going to have 19 of your 20 1TB drives essentially added together, but with 20 disks in your array, it's likely that there may be multiple failures.
so really this leaves 3 possible options...
You use RAID 5, but you allocate one drive as a hot swap drive, this means that the drive sits unused until another drive fails and it's needed
Code:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
=======================
D1 D2 D3 D4 D5 D6 D7 HS
how Imagine that drive 3 fails, the Hot spare takes over, and the array is rebuilt onto that drive. then when drive 3 is replaced, either the array will rebuild onto that drive leaving disk 8 as the hot spare again, or drive 3 will become the hot spare until such a time as another disk fails. then it'd assume that responsibility.
Code:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
=======================
D1 D2 XX D4 D5 D6 D7 D3
either the hot spare, or one of the disks in the array could fail. at the same time(!)
You could also use use RAID 6,
this will lead to you having an 18TB array (18 data drives, 2 parity disks), you have better fault resistance because there are 2 Parity disks but there will be an increase in the time taken to write data to the disks. due to the fact that the parity has to be calculated using a complicated mechanism at each data write.
Lastly, you could have raid 5+0.
What this means is that you'd have 2 arrays, each would have 10 disks, arranged in a RAID 5 array, (9 data disks, 1 Parity disk) each array would be 9TB
then you add these disks together using a RAID 0 array.
This would give you a fairly well protected array, (any one disk from either array could fail) -you could have 2 disks failed at once, just one from either array...
you also get the added benefit of the increased read speed. (would be the same speed as RAID 6 as data is being read from 18 individual spindles), but the write operations would be faster as the parity calculation is easier, (unless you have hardware acceleration for RAID 6 calculations).
Any questions, then feel free to ask.
RAID 2 is intentionally omitted because practically nobody uses it.