When to use RAID 3 and why?
RAID Recovery - When to use RAID 3 and why?
Unlike RAID 7, RAID 3 is rarely used among all levels. According to some users, RAID 5 is superior in terms of performance, reliability and compatibility than RAID level 3 or 7.
Some disadvantages like:
- Transaction rate is equal to that of a single disk drive at best
- Fairly complex design of controller system
- Quite difficult and resource intensive to do as a ‘software’ RAID
In spite of its drawbacks, some specialised areas and benefits are unavoidable like:
- Single dedicated parity disk,
- High read and write data rate,
- No performance degradation in single drive failure,
- Similar performance in best or worst case
RAID 3 is combination of striping as well as parity and it stores all the parity information is individual parity disk. The result is an array that is certainly poor not only at random writes but also at random read. So it is clear that RAID 3 is not suitable or effective especially for transactional applications. But, on the contrary, RAID 3 shines in sequential read and write. In fact, it has been proved that RAID 3 is faster than RAID 5 in sequential read and write that works as efficiently as RAID 0 with the greater advantage of data protection. However, it reveals that RAID 3 is very good choice for larger files with mass amount of data and with the all workload. In applications that needs heavy updating and large file usage like graphics, video editing, video publishing, image editing, pre press, and streaming media, RAID 3 has most commonly applied.
Apart from this, a RAID 3 array has the capacity to bear the loss of single drive, and the most modern RAID 3 system supports hot spares as well as automatic rebuilding.
