Compaq ProLiant 5000 Disk Subsystem Performance and Scalability - Page 29
Table 13, Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks Levels
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ECG025.0997 WHITE PAPER (cont.) ... Table 13: Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks Levels RAID Level Description RAID 0 (No Fault Tolerance) This RAID level is not a true fault tolerance method because it does not provide data redundancy; therefore, provides no fault protection against data loss. RAID 0 is known as "stripe sets" because data is simply striped across all of the drives in the array. This configuration provides high performance at a low cost, however, you incur a risk of possible data loss. RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring) This configuration of mirrored sets of data uses 50 percent of drive storage capacity to provide greater data reliability by storing a duplicate of all user data on a separate disk drive. Therefore, half of the drives in the array are duplicated or "mirrored" by the other half. This RAID level does provide performance equal to or better than RAID 0, but your drive cost doubles because this level requires twice as many disk drives to store the same amount of data and therefore might not be cost-effective for your environment. RAID 5 (Distributed Data Guarding) RAID 5 is commonly called "Distributed Data Guarding" or "Stripe Sets with Parity". This level of RAID actually breaks data up into blocks, calculates parity, then writes the data blocks in "stripes" to the disk drives, saving one stripe on each drive for the parity data. This method is cost effective with the added benefit of high performance because the parity information is distributed across all the drives. The total amount of disk space used for redundancy is equivalent to the capacity of a single drive; therefore, the overall cost for this method of fault tolerance is lower than Disk Mirroring (RAID 1). DISK SUBSYSTEM SUMMARY OF FINDINGS Within this document we have learned how a few key disk performance concepts can help you identify bottlenecks and improve performance within your disk subsystem. We have gathered these concepts and summarized the information. These concepts are: • Disk-Related Measurement Terms • Understanding the Transfer Rates within the Disk Subsystem • The Importance of File System Cache • Benefits of Scaling 29