Chris Bell Chris Bell 'A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.'
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SNHU - IT-600 - Operating Systems
Written by: Chris Bell - November, 2015

RAID Levels Matrix - Benefits and Drawbacks for Operating Systems

  RAID 0 RAID 1 RAID 5 RAID 10
Benefits Provides very fast access by spreading data across all member disks. Provides more protection by mirroring. If a drive fails there's another drive with the data. RAID 5 uses parity across multiple disks and needs a minimum of 3 drives. If data fails on one drive it can be retrieved from another. Combination of RAID 0 and 1 because data is mirrored, then striped across multiple disks.
Drawbacks If one disk fails, all data is lost because each block represents the ONLY copy of the data. It only has half the capacity of the physical capacity because the data is all duplicated which uses twice as much space. It's also not as fast as RAID 0. 1 TB of data becomes 3/4 TB due to the parity across disks. It's more expensive to implement due to complexity. Only half of the physical capacity can be used because the data is duplicated. The cost is much higher to implement, so it's not a simple choice even though it's the best version.
Business Impact Businesses that need the fastest access with no redundancy will benefit; however, businesses sensitive to data loss should avoid RAID 0. A business would need to choose between the speed of RAID 0 with little protection, or the protection of RAID 1 with slower speed. Protection and speed at a higher cost to the business. Most of the speed from RAID 0 and most of the protection from RAID 1 combined. Businesses would benefit greatly from upgrading to RAID 10 because it's the most sophisticated version. Data protection and fast speeds together make it the most beneficial, but at the highest cost.


References:

Iomega Corporation (July, 2010). All About RAID
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP0iQs8qBNU