As more and more information is being stored on computers, particularly home computers and laptops, people are seeking ways to protect all their personal files, images, and other documents.
For some, there is a desire to improve performance of their photo editing, video editing, music editing, or other desktop applications. Increasingly, people are looking to RAID storage solutions for these problems. But will RAID storage solutions actually deliver what people are looking for?
Introduction to RAID
RAID was developed way back when hard disk devices were much slower, and much more unreliable (causing many major system outages). They needed a way to alleviate these problems, and so engineers defined different ways to combine separate disk drives together to address them. They came up with RAID and defined it in different levels from 0-5, and more recently some have added a RAID level 6. Mostly only RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-1+0 (or RAID10), RAID-5, are in general use (and now RAID-6).
More details about the different RAID levels and their capabilities, costs, and benefits will be discussed in the articles referenced below.
RAID Storage Solutions for Data Protection
Hard disk drives fail often, and a full recovery from backups is often a complex and time-consuming process. RAID storage solutions can provide data protection against a hardware failure so that a full recovery from backups will (hopefully) not be necessary. The promise of better data protection from RAID storage products has driven many people to look harder at these solutions.
However, not all RAID storage solutions will provide the desired data protection. As well, RAID storage solutions will not completely eliminate the need to use other data protection methods. The important thing is to choose the right RAID storage solution which takes into account the budget, storage capacity needs, and data protection needs.
RAID storage for data protection is covered in much more detail in the article How RAID Storage Protects Data.
RAID Storage Solutions for Performance Improvement
When applications perform reads and writes to disk, this is called disk I/O; and when there are more concurrent disk I/Os than the disk drive can service quickly, wait queues build and performance suffers. When configured correctly for the workload mix, RAID storage can provide performance benefits to some extent in these situations.
But RAID storage performance benefits are very dependent on the type of activity generated by the application workload running on the computer. A more in-depth discussion of the potential benefits from RAID performance is discussed in the article How RAID Storage Improves Performance.
Examining RAID Storage Cost and Benefits Trade-Offs
Armed with a better understanding of the capabilities of RAID storage solutions for data protection, and also with information about RAID performance capabilities, the real world requires that these needs are all balanced against the budget available. Particularly on single user system, the benefits may not balance well with the cost of the RAID solutions.
A discussion of the trade-offs between the different RAID storage levels for data protection and for potential RAID performance benefits, compared to the relative cost of each option, appears in the article RAID Storage Cost-Benefits Trade-Offs. With all of these pieces, and given careful consideration to cost, performance and data protection needs, the probability of a successful investment is maximized.
