October Bits-N-Bytes

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What is RAID and why should you care?
By Leo Bletnitsky, President, Desktop Valet

RAID is an acronym that is often heard in a context that is unrelated to roaches or ants. RAID stands for a "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives".

What this means to a business is that if the proper level of RAID is used, the data on its servers is safe from loss due to a single hard drive failure.

The typical levels of RAID are levels 0, 1 and 5. RAID 0, spreads data across many drives and should only be used for data that needs to be access very fast, but whose loss is of no big concern, as this level provides no protection against data loss.

RAID 1 is data mirroring, it writes all data to two identical drives simultaneously, therefore allowing your server to continue functioning even if one of the drives fails.

RAID 5 is a higher level of RAID and required three or more hard drives, the data is spread over all the drives, however each drive has enough data that is any one drive fails, the server has the ability to still continue running until the failed drive is
replaced.

RAID 5 is more expensive that RAID 1 for small amounts of data, but become far more economical as the storage requirements increase.

Beware of incorrect RAID configurations! Our newest client did not realize that their server was setup with RAID 0 and recently lost all of their data due to one of their five server hard drives failing. To add to their predicament, their last backup was over one month old. That's a lot data re-entry for their already busy staff!