Which RAID type should you choose?

You’ve been asked to put together the technical requirements for a new file server. For the hard drive system, you’ve been asked to provide a RAID solution that maintains a complete duplicate of all traffic. If one disk fails, the system should continue to run and all data should remain available. Which RAID type should you choose?

A) RAID 0

B) RAID 1

C) RAID 5

D) No RAID type is required

The answer: B) RAID 1

RAID 1 is also called mirroring, and it’s a perfect match if you need to duplicate all traffic across different disks while maintaining uptime and availability if a disk is lost.

The incorrect answers:

A) RAID 0
RAID 0, or striping, splits files between physical hard drives to improve read and write performance. Unfortunately, if a drive is lost the entire array is broken and the lost data is unrecoverable.

C) RAID 5
RAID 5 (striping with parity) improves on RAID 0 by adding additional parity information. Although an exact duplicate of data isn’t available, information from a lost drive can be reconstructed using the parity data.

D) No RAID type is required
If you need to duplicate traffic and maintain availability in a disk failure, then you definitely need a RAID array.

Want to know more? Watch “Configuring RAID.” RAID technology provides organizations around the world with real-time redundancy of important data. In this video, we’ll show you how RAID works and we’ll discuss the different configuration options for RAID. We’ll also provide some hands-on detail with a live demonstration of the RAID configuration process in Microsoft Windows.