Essay on Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks

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Essay on Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks

Introduction

The acronym RAID was originally proposed to stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive disks, but this has now changed and RAID now stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. RAID is a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. RAID disk drives are used frequently on servers but aren't generally necessary for personal computers. The RAID concept was originally described in the paper “A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)” which was written by three University of California Berkeley researchers: David Patterson, Garth Gibson, and Randy Katz. The concept was presented at the 1988 conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) (Adaptec, 2004).

In the original paper which presented the concept of RAID, the RAID concept was presented as a solution for the imbalances that existed in a computer system in which the CPU and memory performance was substantially improved, but the hard disk performance was limited by the mechanical forces that had to be taken into consideration in the hard disk design. An array of mechanical disks was proposed as a solution to vastly increase storage capacity to match the CPU and memory performance enhancements. The major drawback associated with the RAID concept was that the Mean Time Between Failure or MTBF for the whole disk array is lower then that for a single disk. The disks that are used for RAID are of the same type which is used for personal computers and microcomputers. Putting together an array of disks means that not only is the storage capacity of the array enhanced, but that the maximum data transfer rate for the array is also enhanced to the sum of the individual disk drive transfer rates, resulting in faster storage and retrieval. The MTBF for the whole array is the MTBF for one disk divided by the number of disks that are fitted into the array....

ESSAYS ON COMPUTER