RAID(Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a method of combining two or more hard disk drives into one logical unit.
The advantage of an Array is to provide better performance or data fault tolerance. Fault tolerance is archived through data redundant operation, where if one drives fails, a mirrored copy of the data can be found on another drive. This can prevent data loss if the operating system fails or hangs. The individual disk drives in an array are called «members». The configuration information of each member is recorded in the «reserved sector» that identifies the drive as a member. All disk members in a formed disk array are recognized as a single physical drive to the operating system.
A host controller supports RAID 0 and RAID 1.
RAID 0 (Striping)
RAID 0 reads and writes sectors of data interleaved between multiple drives. If any disk member fails, it affects the entire array. The disk array data capacity is equal to the number of drive members times the capacity of the smallest member. The striping block size can be set from 4KB to 64KB. RAID 0 does not support fault tolerance.
RAID 1 (Mirroring)
RAID 1 writes duplicate data onto a pair of drives and reads both sets of data in parallel. If one of the mirrored drives suffers a mechanical failure or does not respond, the remaining drive will continue to function. Due to redundancy, the drive capacity of the array is the capacity of the smallest drive. Under a RAID 1 setup, an extra drive called as the spare drive can be attached. Such a drive will be activated to replace a failed drive that is part of a mirrored array. Due to the fault tolerance, if any RAID 1 drive fails, data access will not be affected as long as there are other working drives in the array.
