Published in Military Embedded Systems
By Steven Petric
Network-attached storage (NAS) systems for mission-critical applications often rely on a redundant array of independent disk (RAID) configurations to mitigate data loss from disk failures, improve data throughput speed, and maximize storage efficiency. Users can effectively implement RAID to optimize their NAS systems and ensure critical data protection in deployed environments by carefully considering storage capacity, performance, and platform requirements.
By combining multiple physical disks into a single system, RAID distributes data using various methods to achieve redundancy and speed. There are five primary RAID architectures – RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 (configurations 2, 3, and 4 are essentially obsolete) – each of which offers unique advantages and drawbacks.
RAID 0 is designed for speed and employs striping to distribute data across multiple disks: Striping entails dividing the data into blocks and spreading the blocks across multiple disks. RAID 0 can be formed using two or more disks of various types, such as FC, SATA, NVMe, SSD, or HDD. RAID 0 carries the advantage of maximizing storage efficiency by fully utilizing all disks in the array, contributing to total available capacity, making it a cost-efficient option for using all the disk capacity. RAID 1 is known as disk mirroring because it stores identical copies of data stored on multiple disks. Primary drawbacks of RAID 1 are slower speed, reduced capacity, and increased cost. As data is replicated across multiple disks, the usable storage capacity is halved when compared to RAID 0, but RAID 1 does carry the advantage of being able to recover from one failed disk.
