RAID Disks

The RAID is nothing but a simple combination of the several storage media. The storage media are necessarily the hard disk drives that are used for the storage of the data. The technology and the implementation of RAID are quite useful for the servers. The disk drives used for the purpose of the implementation of the RAID servers are nothing but just the normal hard disk drives that are used in the regular personal computers or the so called PC’s. The name RAID in simple English sentence can be defined as the “Just a Bunch of Disks”. This means that the RAID itself is a bunch of disks. (But Note that RAID and JBOD are two different terminologies).

If you have some storage disk drives or the secondary memory in a computer system then you possibly implement the RAID. It is also possible to configure the RAID system and install it. The RAID stands for the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. The word Array specifies here that the disks are used like the arrays in the in any programming language. The disk drives are considered as the elements of this array. Hence the sentence “Just a Bunch of Disks“; justifies the meaning of the name RAID.

The implementation technique implies that they are traditionally made to behave as if they are independent disk drives inside the computer system. It is similar to the fact that the numbers of the hard disk drives are used in the Personal Computer probably two, three etc. Also in some of the software programs or some kind of computer application it may be desirable to use more than one disk drive; as if they are a one single disk volume. The use of more than one disk drive is called as the “spanning”. The most appropriate word for using more than one disk drive is called as spanning. This term of spanning is completely in contrast along with the term RAID that is the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. The term JBOD “Just a Bunch of Disks” is in contrast along with the term RAID.

The partitioning is also a concept of dividing the physical disk into a number of different partitions that behave completely as the independent disks. The partitioning is usually logical and does not have any relevance to the physical levels of the disk drive. The JBOD can be considered as the opposite or the antonym of partitioning. The partitioning what it does is; it chops of the single physical drive into the smaller logical drive volumes. But at the same time in the JBOD what happens is that it combines the different physical disk drives into a larger logical drive volume. The method of JBOD does not provide any fault tolerance to the computer system. Even this JBOD do not provide any improvement in the efficiency or the reliability of the system.

The concept not even enhance the over all performance of the system. But in argument and in fact it does degrade the performance of the system that is in comparison with the usage of the independent disk drives. The performance is degraded by making it hard and difficulty in the usage of the disk drives in concurrency. That is in other words it degrade the performance by trying to optimize different disk drives for the many different or various users. What it requires is only a controller hardware card and a driver for that card that is essentially software. The only two advantages of JBOD over the RAID 0 are: 1) To avoid drive wastage and 2) It is easier in the case of any disaster recovery.

Data Recovery Software - RAID Recovery

More Information
RAID 0
RAID 1
RAID 1+0
RAID 5
Adaptive RAID
Different RAID Levels
RAID Configuration
RAID Advantages
RAID Reliability Issues
Bad RAID Parity
RAID Concept
RAID Controller
Software Vs Hardware RAID
Quantum DX30 Drives
IBM Servers RAID
IDE RAID Controllers
Fibre Channel
RAID SATA Data Loss
SCSI Interface
Hot Swapping
Storage Controllers
Western Digital RAID Drives
Technical Factors RAID
NAS Servers
Storage Area Network

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