Intel AFCSASRISER User Guide - Page 22

Selecting a RAID Level To ensure the best performance, select the optimal RAID level when the system drive is created. The optimal RAID level for a disk array depends on a number of factors: • The number of physical drives in the disk array • The capacity of the physical drives in the array • The need for data redundancy • The disk performance requirements RAID 0 - Data Striping RAID 0 provides disk striping across all drives in the RAID array. RAID 0 does not provide any data redundancy, but does offer the best performance of any RAID level. RAID 0 breaks up data into smaller segments, and then stripes the data segments across each drive in the array. The size of each data segment is determined by the stripe size. RAID 0 offers high bandwidth. Note: RAID level 0 is not fault tolerant. If a drive in a RAID 0 array fails, the whole virtual disk (all physical drives associated with the virtual disk) will fail. By breaking up a large file into smaller segments, the RAID controller can use both SAS drive and SATA drives to read or write the file faster. RAID 0 involves no parity calculations to complicate the write operation. This makes RAID 0 ideal for applications that require high bandwidth but do not require fault tolerance. RAID 0 RAID Adapter Uses Strong Points Weak Points Drives ABCDEF Available Capacity N=# disks C = Disk Capacity Available Capacity = N*C A B C D E F Data Striping RAID 0 Figure 1. RAID 0 - Data Striping Table 1. RAID 0 Overview Provides high data throughput, especially for large files. Any environment that does not require fault tolerance. Provides increased data throughput for large files. No capacity loss penalty for parity. Does not provide fault tolerance or high bandwidth. If any drive fails, all data is lost. 1 to 32 10 Intel® RAID Software User's Guide