Performance issues in RAID
RAID Recovery - Performance issues in RAID
The actual purpose of developing RAID was to protect the stored data by developing an effective fault tolerance system. In course of time, while large chunk of data processing has also become one of the most important aspects; what matters with RAID are, performance, reliability, availability and fault tolerance.
RAID is responsible for high performance hard disk engineering which helps getting positive results like drives with multiple drives. Multiple drive arrays possess multiple actuators which are significant for special engineering. With its high versatility, RAID helps both manufacturers as well as customers. Parallelism is the key to increase the performance under RAID. Parallelism means the capacity to access multiple disks concurrently which permit data for reading or writing from a RAID array in the fastest possible way.
In course of development, different RAID levels came to meet the system requirements. As far as their performance is concerned, they are all worthwhile barring a few draw backs that come along with almost all scientific inventions.
For example, RAID 0 provides superior input/output performance but without any fault tolerance capacity. RAID 1 can store data on a data disk and on a mirror disk and if one disk fails then data can be retrieved from the other one. Apart from it, RAID 1 has an excellent reading and writing speed comparing to single disk but storage capacity is half of total disk capacity.
RAID 3 strip set can handle single disk without losing important data and provides high throughput for large data transfer but it is very complex system and very slow for small input/output operations. RAID 5 is the most popular and commonly used among all levels; extra memory cache can also be provided to improve the write performance. But, RAID 5 is again very complex and requires a professional hand to look after. RAID 10, combination of RAID 1 and 0, is very simple technology and data transfer rate is very high but it is slower in higher data transfers.
