A Beginners guide to raid

Part 1 :What is raid?

Raid stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It is a system that
allows multiple hard drives to be recognized as one, allowing for greater
storage capacity, increased performance, data redundancy, or a mix of these
three.
It used to be the case that RAID was only for servers and high end
workstation. But today almost all Southbridge’s have some sort of integrated
raid.
Also it is important to note that raid is not a substitute for a good back up
strategy.

Part 2: RAID types or levels

Most common RAID levels.

These are the most common raid levels

● JBOD (Concatenation of Physical disks to create a single logical drive)

● Raid 0 (Striped Set)
● Raid 1 (Mirrored Set)
● Raid 5 (Striped set with Distributed Parity)
● Raid 6 (striped set with Double Distributed Parity)

JBOD
JBOD is not one of the numbered raid levels but is a popular way of
combining disks together of a mismatched size. In A JBOD array the discs are
concatenated together end to end to create one large logical volume. JBOD
can make smaller drives more useful than if they were used singularly. JBOD
goes by a few names and is available as a software raid system in most
operating systems.

Raid 0

Raid 0 isn't really a level of raid at all, it's not redundant hence it has level 0
redundancy i.e. None. Raid 0 Stripes the data across disks like this.
 Raid 0 Logical Disk
Disk0 Disk1

A1 A2

A3 A4

A5 A6

A7 A8

If one drive fails : Array and data destroyed

If two drives fail: Array and data Destroyed

Read performance:
Theoretical : Number or Drives x speed of the slowest disk
Reality : about 75% of theoretical at best

Write Performance:
Theoretical : Number or Drives x speed of the slowest disk
Reality : about 75% of theoretical at best.

Advantages:
● Faster than one drive
● Cheaper than one large drive usually i.e. 2X 500gb are cheaper than
one 1tb drives
● can reach larger capacity's than one drive can. i.e. 2 1TB drives can
create a 2TB array.

Disadvantages
● No redundancy
● Higher chance of array failure than one disk

Good usage scenario: Web servers, read only file servers, video editing page
files and temp storage.

Raid 1

Raid 1 is the first of the real Raid levels. It has level 1 redundancy. Raid 1
works by mirroring the data over 2 drives. This is called mirroring.
 Raid 1 Logical Disk
Disk 0 Disk 1

A1 A1

A2 A2

A3 A3

A4 A4

If one disk fails: Data is still safe but array runs degraded
If two disks fails: data is lost. Fatal array failure occurs

Read performance:

Theoretical: Around 150% of single disk performance if a good controller is

used.
Reality: just over 100% of slowest disk.
Write performance:

Theoretical: Around the same as a single disk.

Reality: Just under is software controller is used.

Advantages:

● All data is kept intact after a failure

● No real performance hit as there is no parity data to be worked out.

Disadvantages

●Inefficient use of space.

● Can still run the risk of failure although the chance of dual disk failure is
quite high.
Good usage scenario: general file servers

Raid 5

I must admit that i have a soft spot for raid 5. it is my favorite raid level. It has
saved me on a number of occasions involving many gig's of data including
my As ICT project the day before it had to be in. so i must say that i am
slightly biased towards it.

Raid 5 uses the same type of block level in a similar fashion to Raid 0. The
crucial difference being that Raid 5 adds an additional step of working out a
parity block for that block of data and stores it on the disk that is not being
used to store the data. The disk used to store the parity is changed with every
block write. This creates the distributed Parity of raid 5.

Raid 5 also suffers from a condition called the Raid 5 Write hole. This
happens when the system fails and there are still outstanding writes in the
cache. The parity of the stripe may become corrupt. If this is not fixed before
one of the disk fails this will lead to corruption.

Raid 5 needs at least 3 drives to work.(A two disk Raid 5 set is possible on
some controllers but is not often implemented used it negates a lot of the
benefits of raid 5.)

Raid 5 Logical Disk

Key: Disk0 Disk1 Disk1
P = Parity
Block
A = Data A1 A2 P1
Block
A3 P2 A4

P3 A5 A6

A7 A8 P4

If one drive Fails: Array runs in degraded mode. All disk space still available.
If two drives fail: Array fails

Read performance:
Theoretical: Roughly the same speed as Raid 0 unless a block fails a CRC
check. Then data is read from parity, Causing a slight dip in performance.
Reality: If a good hardware controller is used the performance is much the
same as theoretical

Write performance:
Theoretical: If large amount of small changes are made data can become
backed up and performance can take a hit. if large files are written
performance can be very good.

Reality: Very similar to the theoretical sample but is very dependent on the
controller.
Good usage scenario: Gaming desktops, critical file servers

Raid 6

Raid 6 is a natural evolution Raid 5.it adds a second disk for Parity data. Raid
6 excels in larger disk sets where reliability is needed. i.e in a set of 4 disk
raid 6 would give you the space of just 2 meaning it is just as disk efficient
raid 1+0 but would not be as fast but in a 12 disk array you would have the
disk space of 10 of the disk but the array would be able to be sustain 2 disk
failures where as raid 5 would only be able to sustain only one failure and in
such a large array multiple failures would be probable.

Nested raid levels

With nested raid levels there can be many different raid levels. almost too
many. And I'm not going to cover them in much detail.
the most common nested Raid levels are:

● Raid 10
● raid 0+1
● Raid 100
● Raid 50
● Raid 60

For more information go to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_RAID_levels

Non standard raid levels

There are a few non standard raid levels that you might come across. These
are detailed below. They are not usually given a number like raid 5 or raid 1
they have names given to them by the Company that created them.

Intel Matrix raid

Intel matrix raid is a system of raid that combines raid onto to of more disk
without having a separate set of disks for each raid level.
The below diagram uses a raid 1 and a raid 0 set:

Intel® Matrix® logical Disk Raid 0 and 1 spilt

Disk0 Disk1

A1 A2

A3 A4
Raid 0 Partition
A5 A6

A7 A8

A1 A1

A2 A2
Raid 1 Partition
A3 A3

A4 A4

Additionally you can use a raid 5 set over 3 disks as below:

 Intel® Matrix® logical Disk Raid 0 and 5 Spilt
Disk 0 Disk 1 Disk 2 Disk 3

A1 A2 A3 A4
Raid 0
A5 A6 A7 A8 Partition
A9 A10 A11 A12

A13 A14 A15 A16

A1 A2 A3 P1
Raid 5
A4 A5 P2 A6 Partition

A7 P3 A8 A9

P4 A10 A11 A12

Part 3: Controllers

There are three distinct type of Raid controller available today these are

1. Hardware
2. Software

Hardware controllers

Hardware controllers are expensive but they give you the best performance
available. These controllers have a hardware processor the usually has
accompanying ram and flash storage. These can be thought of as a whole
extra computer inside your computer.
Hardware controllers are usually powered by Intel/free scale made IOX
processors although some have proprietary raid engines like 3ware and
Areca cards. Hardware controllers are made to be completely independent
and invisible to the system and only to be visible to the end user by the raid
BIOS and monitoring utilities although most operating systems need drivers
to see the card. Luckily though if you are after a cheap fully hardware raid
card you do not have to look far. The Revo card made by XFX is a fully
hardware card and supports raid 3 at the time of writing the card is available
for around £30 - £40 and has the bonus of 64mb of cache on-board. Also
there are cheap hardware raid cards on e Bay almost constantly.
Characteristics of a hardware raid card:

● Expensive
● Big (some cards such as IBM's serve raid cards can be 14 inches long)
● Dedicated on-board I/O processor
● usually has on-board cache( either as a Replaceable and upgradeable
DIMM or soldered on the board)

Software controller

Almost every motherboard shipped today has some for of software raid
controller on the motherboard. These software raid chips are usually
integrated into the chip sets such as Intel south bridges ending in R (i.e.
ICH5R , ICH6R ,ICH7R ,ICH8R AND ICH9R) and almost all Nvidia Nforce
chip sets.

Software controllers are usually in the form of cheap controller cards that offer
raid functionality. The cards themselves offer very little in the way of raid on
the chip itself. This is usually provided by the driver witch off loads all of the
processing to the CPU this is not necessarily a bad thing but large writes can
tax the processor and if you use your computer for gaming a large write can
slow your game to a slide show in the worst cases.

One of the better software raid systems is Intel’s raid Southbridge’s. These
are incredibly well made controllers with a very highly matured driver and can
easily achieve 300MB/s through put with the right hardware.

Part 4: Stripe sizes

On most controllers you have the ability to chose your stripe size. This may
look confusing but it really is not. all you really need to know is what the
different sizes are good for. There is a general rule of thumbs that the stripe
size should be twice that of of the file systems block size. this is not
necessarily true, because when dealing with NTFS the block size is 4k ,so the
stripe size would be 8k and this would mean poor performance with large
files. ideally the best point for general usage is around 64k. but having a large
stripe size would not effect storage space adversely.

These are the typical stripe sizes found today:

● 4k
 ● 8k
● 16k
● 32k
● 64k
● 128k
● 256k
● 512k
● 1024k

The extremities of this are only useful in very specialist cases. For the most
part 64k would be the most useful to most people. This assumes that you
have chosen to use raid 5. For raid 0 you would do just fine using around the
8k mark.
Produced by:
Alistair Senior

With thanks to:

Supershanks: For pointing out another way of using matrix raid.
TiG : For giving me the idea to put in usage scenario's
Streetster: Spelling, punctuation and layout fixing.
and my mother: For not getting annoyed at finding hard drives
scattered around the house.
Questions,comments,suggestions and hate mail to:
al[at]alsenior.co.uk or
PM 'alsenior' on Hexus community forums. http://forums.hexus.net

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