As media takes ever-growing amounts of space, storage has become something that is sought after more and more — and people are buying RAID drives to get what they need. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. “Redundant” is key here, as the original purpose of RAIDs was to have multiple drives storing the same information at one time (referred to as RAID 1), so that if one fails the others will retain the same data.
However, the RAID needs to be configured for redundancy. Many people use RAID systems for speed of drive access, and keep a separate backup. This would be RAID 0, in which the data is striped across all drives, decreasing access and write time if the unit can write a single file to two drives. However, in a RAID 1, there is no backup. There must be a separate backup kept elsewhere.
Thus, if one has bought a RAID unit and just started using it without setup, it may not be configured for what he or she is looking to use it for. It’s important to be very selective, as if you’re looking for redundancy, RAID 0 would result in no redundant copies. Worse still, if one drive in a RAID 0 fails, the rest of the raid is generally lost, as it strongly relies on the missing pieces copied to that failed drive.
RAID 5 or 6 is a great compromise between 0 and 1, where all but one drive in the RAID is striped with “parity”, that being there are redundant copies of files copied across the drives, and the speed advantage of striping data across multiple drives is more or less retained. If one (or two in RAID 6) drive fails, the data is still intact across the remaining drives.
If you’re looking at RAID enclosures for your storage needs, pay close attention to what type of configurations it supports, and ensure it’s configured properly before copying any data to it, as it needs to be erased and rebuilt each time the configuration is changed. If you do opt for a striped (RAID 0) setup, ensure you have a secondary RAID as a backup.