Hardware Vs Software Raid Mac
- Hardware Vs Software Raid Machine
- Hardware Vs Software Raid Macbook Pro
- Software Raid Vs Hardware Raid
I am assuming you mean Hardware RAID with LVM on Top, vs. LVM and Software RAID on top of LVM. If so, I always advise to opt for hardware based RAID first. Software RAID is just that, while overhead is small, hardware RAID performance will be better 9 out of 10 times. Of course, the methodology will very much depend on your final goal. Software RAID is easier and much cheaper; hardware RAID is powerful but more expensive. This table summarizes the key differences between hardware and software RAIDs. In a nutshell, if you have. For my use Mac Mini HTPC, Plex, 5 x 5TB WD Reds RAID 5 would software RAID 5 via SoftRaid offer a better likelihood of rebuild than the hardware included in the Mobius? Appreciate your thoughts and thanks in advance. Edit: Seems like the overwhelming opinion was that RAID controller for that enclosure is sub par. I'm going the route of. With cheaper hardware RAID you can also lose data if there’s a power outage. With software RAID your data can be split across different enclosures for complete redundancy - one can completely stop working and your data is still ok. You can easily move disks from. Apr 24, 2007 Of course. Here's how.As the comments on my recent post Apple's new kick-butt file system showed, some folks can't believe that software RAID could be faster than a modern hardware RAID.
In this episode of Storage Board, we’ll take a look at RAID data storage and find out how it works.
Video transcript
Hi, I’m Mikey from Ontrack data recovery and welcome to Storage Board! In this episode we’re going to looking at RAID systems – what they are and how they work – but before we go any further, let’s define exactly what RAID stands for.
Defining RAID
RAID stands for the Redundant Array of Independent Disks and it is a method of data storage where you can distribute or spread data across multiple disks, all with the aim of increasing performance and reliability.
It is no surprise then that organizations are the top users of RAID systems due to the increase in reliability; a concept that has been around for 30 years, and you don’t have to be a company to use it – you could be an individual, perhaps working on video editing or music production. It is used not only to increase performance and reliability over using a single drive, but also to increase volume sizes, which is why it is favored by organizations so much.
Hardware vs. software RAID
There are two main ways of setting up your RAID system; first, there is a hardware setup; it involves having your host computer (or it could be a server), and a RAID controller in between, which in turn, controls the RAID system itself. In a hardware setup, the RAID controller is responsible for everything to do with RAID; the reading and writing of data, plus where it is stored and what drives it gets written to. The host operating system has no knowledge of the fact that there are multiple drives within the RAID system and sees it all as one logical unit. In a software RAID array it is slightly different; the RAID controller is implemented with the operating system, which has a bit of a decrease in performance as the OS is then doing multiple things at once (as there’s no separate hardware RAID controller).
Before we go onto RAID levels and exactly how they work in practice, we’re going to take a look at some key terms to find out what these RAID systems are.
Key terms
First, there is ‘parity’. Parity is a very important concept within RAID. It is a way of distributing data across multiple drives to aid with load distribution and the recovery of data if something were to go wrong.
Hardware Vs Software Raid Machine
Next, we have ‘redundancy’, which in a computer science sense, is the duplication of critical components, so if one was to fail then the whole system does not go down with it. In the case of RAID systems, these components are the drives. We’ll go into more detail on that again shortly.
The other two really key concepts in RAID are ‘mirroring’ and ‘striping’. Mirroring is quite like what it says on the tin; it’s mirroring data from one drive to another, which replicates the exact same information so it can be recovered if something were to go wrong.
Then we have striping, which is when data is written sequentially across multiple disks and we’ll check out how that works in a moment within a ‘RAID 0’ setup.
Before we do that, it is worth mentioning that there are many different RAID levels out there. We’ve just picked four for the purpose of this video, but for example, if you are a company with custom applications or databases, you may want to create your own RAID level depending on what your exact needs are. Levels go from RAID 0 all the way up to RAID 61 and beyond, but there are also many other nested or custom levels. The ones we will look at here are the four most basic levels.
RAID 0
With a RAID 0 setup, there must be at least two drives using the concept of striping. As you can see, the data is striped across the two disks, which is fantastic in terms of read and write performance over a single disk. However, it is not great in terms of redundancy. This is because if one of those drives were to fail (let’s say drive 1 in this case), that data is not replicated anywhere else, which will cause some headaches as there’s nowhere to get it back from.
RAID 1
RAID 1 is our next level, which takes the concept of mirroring that we looked at earlier. Again, there are two drives in this setup, and it is mirroring the data from the first drive onto the second drive. This means that if drive 1 were to fail in this RAID configuration, you would be able to restore the data with no issues (as the same data is on drive 2). It adds redundancy and data security and is the lowest form of redundancy available within RAID.
RAID 5
Now let’s move onto the more complex levels and take a look at RAID 5. This introduces the concept of parity – the distributing of data across multiple drives to aid recovery. You can see here that we have four drives in this setup (RAID 5 requires at least three drives) and you can see the parity is highlighted here in red. If one drive were to fail - let’s say drive 4 – the data can be rebuilt using the parity from the other drives (the parity in this RAID 5 takes up the space of one drive in total and it can therefore tolerate one drive failure).
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With RAID 5, you can go one step further and configure a fifth drive: a ‘hot spare’. This is an idle drive that sits within the system with no data written to it, but if one drive were to fail – let’s take drive 4 again – the hot spare (drive 5) would take the place of failed drive 4 and it would be written based on the parity across the other drives and no data gets lost. What you can then do is take out the failed drive and insert a new one into the array, which then becomes your new hot spare. This is another good way of adding redundancy to prevent data loss.
RAID 6
Lastly, we have RAID 6, which takes the concept of parity one step further to ‘dual parity’. You can see here in the RAID 6 array, we have five drives (RAID 6 requires at least four drives) and you can also see the dual parity span across them, taking up the space of two drives in total. This allows for two drives to fail within the array before there’s a problem with getting the data back. This adds some sense of reliability and data security so that if two drives were to go down, with the dual parity across the other drives, you can rebuild the data within that array.
It’s worth mentioning that redundancy and parity are not the same as having backups; always remember to keep separate backups of your RAID system.
Hardware Vs Software Raid Macbook Pro
That sums up RAID in a nutshell – I hope you found this video useful and if you would like more information please check out your local Ontrack office online. Thanks for watching!
Do you store data on a RAID system? What level do you use and why? Let us know by commenting below.
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RAID Controller
Definition
What is a RAID controller? A RAID controller is a card or chip located between the operating system and a storage drive (usually a hard drive). If you want to get some information about the RAID, you can go to MiniTool’s official website to find it.
What does a RAID controller do? They virtualize drives into different groups with specific data protection and redundancy features. The front-end interface typically communicates with the server through a host-based adapter (HBA). The backend communicates with and manages the underlying storage medium; it is usually ATA, SCSI, SATA, SAS or Fibre Channel.
HighPoint SSD7120 is a bootable Quad M.2 PCIe x16 NVMe SSD RAID card that helps to access your NVMe M.2 drives.
RAID controllers are classified by the multiple characteristics include drive types(such as SATA or SAS), specific RAID levels, and the number of ports and supported drives. The RAID controller is not a storage controller. The storage controller provides the active disk to the system, while the RAID controller acts as a RAM cache and provides RAID functions.
Advantages
Now, let’s see the advantages of the RAID controller card. The hardware-based RAID controller architecture is more expensive than software-based RAID, but it can improve system performance without boot errors. The advantages are as follows:
Cache memory
Controller-based RAID typically provides additional dick cache memory to accelerate RAID operations.
Dedicated processing
The controller-based system independently manages RAID configuration in addition to the operating system. Moreover, the capacity and speed of RAID controllers are superior to software-only RAID since RAID controllers do not require disk processing capabilities.
Lack of boot errors
And, it is affected by boot errors, which can damage the entire array because software-only RAID resides on the operating system. However, RAID controllers will not be affected by boot errors.
Hardware VS Software RAID Controllers
Hardware-Based: RAID Controller
The dedicated hardware controller has two different architectures: an external RAID Controller Card and an internal RAID-on-chip.
RAID Controller Card: RAID controller card is an expansion card inserted into a PCIe or PCI-X motherboard slot. It has a RAID processor and I/O processor with drive interface.
RAID-on-chip: Cheaper RAID-on-chip is a single motherboard chip with an integrated host interface, HDD I/O interface, RAID processor and memory controller.
Software-Based: Server-Based RAID
Software RAID provides RAID services from the host. It has two types: software-only RAID and hybrid hardware/software RAID.
Software-only RAID: As a native function on the system, software-only RAID makes the least expensive of the RAID options. The host-based application manages RAID calculations and uses HBA or native I/O interfaces to attach to storage drives.
Hybrid hardware RAID: Hybrid hardware/software RAID delivers RAID BIOS functions from the motherboard or HBA by using a hardware component. Hybrid technology adds another layer and the price of software-only is higher, but it can protect RAID systems from operating system error boot errors.
Different RAID Levels
RAID controllers are specific to RAID levels. The most common levels are RAID 0, 1, 5/6, and 10. The details are as follows:
RAID 0: Striping - RAID 0 is the only RAID level that does not provide redundancy but only improves hard drive performance. RAID 0 divides files and splits data on two or more disks, and treats the divided disks as one partition.
RAID 1: Mirroring – RAID 1 works on two or more desktops to provide data redundancy and failover. It reads and writes the same data to each disk. If the mirrored disk fails, the file will be fully present on a functioning disk.
Software Raid Vs Hardware Raid
Raid 5/6: Striping with Parity/Double Parity – RAID 5/6 combines the performance of RAID 0 with the redundancy of RAID 1, but requires about one-third of the available capacity.
RAID 10: Striping and Mirroring - RAID 10 is the most expensive of the RAID levels. It is striped on at least four disks to improve performance and redundant on mirrors. In a four-drive array, the system stripes data to two disks. The remaining two disks mirror the striped disks and each disk stores half of the data.
Also see: Commonly Used Hardware RAID You Should Know
Final Words
To sum up, this post mainly introduces some information on the RAID controller include the definition, advantages as well as the different levels. Hence, you will have a comprehensive and deep understanding of the RAID controllers.