What is RAID hard drive
RAID Recovery - What is RAID hard drive
Basically, two or more inexpensive hard drives are assembled in a RAID system to create single mass capacity storage device that helps improving performance. When RAID system was introduced, it was intended to be used by large businesses needed to store data worth millions of dollars. It can protect against important data loss if any of the hard drives fail to work; although, it is not really means to be used as a backup solution for the average users. But in recent past, the popularity of RAID has undoubtedly increased and it has been anticipated to be widely used in more personal computer systems.
RAID can be classified into two categories: hardware RAID and software RAID. In hardware RAID, the storage system is created by the two hard drives that is managed separately from the host computer, which appears as a single drive in the computer. The host computer does not recognize that RAID is being used. As far as hardware is concerned, some of the RAID system can be put in a place with a special hard controller card or RAID system functionality can be directly placed in the mother board.
Different types of RAID hard drive
There are various types of RAID hard drives are available in the marketplace:
- IDE/ATA/PATA/EIDE
- ULTRA/ATA 100
- SAS
- SCSI
- ESDI
- Fibre channel
- USB
- Firewire
- PCMSIA
- RLL
- iSCSI
- eSATA
- SATA II/2.0
- SATA
- MFM
How a hard drive functions
Hard drives consist of one or more round magnetic disks known as platter, read/write heads controlled by an actuator, and a spindle on which platter rotates. Each side of platter is used to store data and each head of a platter is divided into two tracks as well as sectors. There is a track on every head and all the tracks together form a cylinder. Data is written to hard drive platter starting at the outer track proceeding towards the centre as sectors are filled.
