Choosing the Right RAID Configuration for Different Purposes

Featured article by Calvin Paige, Independent Technology Author

The technology behind disk arrays and RAID has evolved so much these past few years. The availability of more reliable hard drives and SSDs as well as more advanced RAID controllers have made more RAID configurations possible, even for home users. Each RAID configuration presents its own set of advantages, which is why they suit specific types of usage and circumstance.

Choosing the right RAID setup to use is a lot easier today. You have more tools and different configurations to suit any particular circumstance. In this article, however, we’re going to take a look at some business-related scenarios and discuss the best RAID configuration to use.

High Performance Development Machine

A lot of businesses rely on high-performance desktop PCs to perform certain tasks. Manufacturing companies require capable PCs to handle 3D design and rendering. Retail businesses also rely on speed and capable hard drives to handle data processing and analysis.

For setups with a limited budget, RAID 0 is still the configuration option to go for. Also known as striping, RAID 0 allows a single file to be split into several pieces and written into multiple hard drives simultaneously. The result is a simple and straightforward performance boost.

A RAID 0 configuration with two hard drives will boost write and read speeds by 2 while doubling the capacity of the RAID drive. Adding another hard drive to the mix will up that multiplier to 3. It is the easiest RAID configuration to understand, although it is not the most reliable for maximum data protection.

Data Storage

If you need to store a large amount of data safely, RAID 0 is definitely not the configuration to go for. What you need is RAID that can do mirroring; you need your hard drives to be configured in RAID 1. Instead of splitting one file into multiple parts and writing them simultaneously, RAID 1 writes one file to multiple drives at the same time.

Even when one – or several – of the hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration fails, it is still possible to recover files from the remaining hard drives. Broken hard drives can be replaced without reconfiguring the RAID 1 setup entirely, as long as the replacement has the same storage space and speed rating.

There is no performance or capacity gain with RAID 1 configuration. The extra hard drives you add to the array will only function as redundancies for maximum security.

The Best of Both Worlds

Of course, there is a way to get the best of both worlds. If you want the reliability and security offered by RAID 1, but you also need the performance boost to support resource-intensive tasks, then you can choose between RAID 5, RAID 0+1 and other configuration options.

The best way to choose the right RAID configuration to use is by using a RAID calculator. You can enter the number of hard drives you want to add as well as their capacity before playing around with the RAID configurations to get the best outcome from the setup.