Technology Paper

Add Value by Deploying RAID Technology

By its very denition, RAID is a storage technology intended to give mission-critical machines access to a more reliable storage subsystem. RAID employs multiple hard drives, dividing and replicating data across them any number of ways so that if one or more disks were to fail, no information would be lost. But if thats all you know about RAID, you really have only part of the story. The common perception is that only businesses use RAID. But RAID isnt limited to large servers with big arrays of disks that require protection against failure. In fact, you can enable the storage speed-up of RAID 0 and the data protection of RAID 1 with as few as two drives in almost any desktop PC. Getting started with RAID technology in Windows couldnt be easier, once you decide between 1:1 redundancy through mirroring and additional performance via striping. RAID 0: Serving Up Better Performance There are a number of environments where customers simply cant get enough storage performance but can certainly compromise on redundancy. Video editing, for example, really benets from the fastest hard drives available. Purchasing a couple of inexpensive drives and striping them affords a signicant boost in throughput without the prohibitive cost of a single, higher-performance drive. Striping works by splitting data evenly across two or more drives, albeit without the parity information youd need for redundancy. Additionally, doubling up multiplies capacity. For example, a pair of 1TB hard drives in RAID 0 would actually be presented to the operating system as a single 2TB partition. Beyond the increased speed inherent to a RAID 0 conguration, striping is attractive because so many platforms support it natively. Its a value-add available at no cost. Such ubiquity also means that setting up RAID 0 is a simple process. Most motherboards include an option in the BIOS to operate the onboard storage controller in IDE, AHCI or RAID mode. Selecting RAID enables a secondary

Add Value by Deploying RAID Technology

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Information for this paper was edited from an article originally written and published by John Martinez of RAM Tech Insight Magazine. Visit www.techinsight.tv.

storage BIOS used to turn on and congure RAID 0. Some solutions even allow you to set up and congure RAID through a Windows-based application. An even more automatic approach would be a hardware-based controller capable of setting two drives up in RAID 0 without user intervention. ASUS motherboards equipped with Drive Xpert technology, for instance, sport a JMicron chip that includes a feature called SuperSpeed. Connect a pair of like-sized hard drives and the controller creates its own RAID 0 array. Regardless of how you deploy it, RAID 0 is your best bet for high-capacity, high-performance storage in situations where redundancy isnt necessary, such as video workstations and gaming boxes. RAID 1: Covering All Your Bases Conversely, when its absolutely imperative to protect your data, RAID 1 is perhaps the most economical way to go. The mechanics are fairly simple: in a RAID 1 array, the same information is copied to two drives. Of course, the cost of having the same data on two drives is that you lose the capacity of one of them. A pair of 1TB drives in RAID 1 gives you 1TB of usable space. But should one of the drives fail, the data will still exist on the other drive, which can then be re-mirrored to a new drive to continue the redundancy. As with RAID 0, RAID 1 is included as a valueadd in a great many chipsets, making it easily accessible to almost anyone buying a modern machine. The setup process is very similar to that of RAID 0: Enable RAID in your motherboards BIOS, make sure you have a pair of drives

attached, and build the array using either the secondary BIOS or a Windows-based app. Most of the same motherboard-based controllers that facilitate automatic RAID 0 also offer RAID 1 as an option. In the ASUS Drive Xpert suite, this is referred to as EZ Backup, since each of the two attached drives protects the other. While the applications for RAID 0 are admittedly somewhat specialized, anyone can benet from RAID 1. Its easy to forget to perform a backup, and most people dont believe a drive failure will ever happen to them. For minimal cost, RAID 1 makes safeguarding priceless photos and documents against hardware issues a transparent process. Its peace of mind without performance penalty or expensive software. Use RAID to Add Performance and Redundancy The price of storage is at an all-time low, and 1TB drives are selling for well under US$100. With a relatively small investment and minimal setup, RAID technology gives you the power to dramatically augment the performance of your storage subsystem or facilitate recovery from drive failure. In fact, many motherboard-based controllers go so far as to give you access to RAID 10a stripe of mirrorsenabling the best of both worlds for the price of four hard drives. There is plenty of exibility in utilizing RAID. Setup is easy (in many cases automatic), and the potential benets are massive. If you are currently running a PC with a single hard drive, consider what it could mean to have more speed or better data security. It is likely that adding RAID to your machine makes real sense.

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Seagate Technology LLC 920 Disc Drive, Scotts Valley, California 95066, United States, 831-438-6550 Seagate Technology International Ltd. 7000 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 5, Singapore 569877, 65-6485-3888 Seagate Technology SAS 1618, rue du Dme, 92773, Boulogne-Billancourt Cedex, France 33 1-4186 10 00

2010 Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved. Printed in USA. Seagate, Seagate Technology and the Wave logo are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. When referring to drive capacity, one gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one trillion bytes. Your computers operating system may use a different standard of measurement and report a lower capacity. In addition, some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions, and thus will not be available for data storage. Seagate reserves the right to change, without notice, product offerings or specications. TP616.1-1006US, June 2010