In the last few years RAID has become really quite popular. Once purely in the domain of high-end enterprise servers, today, any self respecting enthusiast motherboard had better have onboard RAID if it wants to be taken seriously. The abundance of onboard RAID controllers mean that it’s not unusual to see small arrays in today’s home computers. The reasons for this can be for increased speed, increased reliability or simply for bragging rights. After all, two (or more) disks are better than one, right?

Depending on whom you ask, RAID can stand for either Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks or Redundant Array of Independent Disks. Technically, the former was the original name given to the use of arrays of more than one drive. The term ‘inexpensive’ was used as RAID was used as a substitute to proprietary disk solutions that, while they offered acceptable performance and fault tolerance, were prohibitively expensive.

RAID was a way to increase performance and add fault tolerance whilst using off-the-shelf disks, reducing costs greatly. There are many different types of RAID and each has their own strengths and drawbacks, no single level of RAID is ‘the best’ and it is important that one picks which RAID level best suits their particular situation.

The different types of RAID can offer a multitude of benefits, whether it’s for an oracle database being accessed by thousands of users simultaneously, for a high performance HD video workstation or simply for a home user storing photos. Each different case obviously has a different set of requirements, and a vastly different budget. Deciding on which level of RAID to use is always a balance between the pros and cons of each. The main aspects to consider are performance, redundancy and of course cost.

Some RAID levels are more focussed on getting all out performance without bothering with redundancy, others provide redundancy as a foremost concern and performance can suffer accordingly. Certain types of RAID require a powerful hardware controller to give acceptable performance, resulting in high costs, whereas others can give adequate performance using a software solution. So what exactly can RAID offer?

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