beautypg.com

Selecting a raid level – Acer Altos G300 Series User Manual

Page 94

background image

5 Configuring IDE Software RAID

82

Selecting a RAID Level

To ensure the best performance, you should select the optimal RAID
level when you create a system drive. The optimal RAID level for your
disk array depends on the following factors:

Number of drives in the disk array

Capacity of the drives in the array

Need for data redundancy

Disk performance requirements

The factors you need to consider when selecting a RAID level are listed
below.

RAID
Level

Description
and Use

Pros

Cons

Number of
Drives

Fault
Tolerant

0

Data divided
in blocks
and
distributed
sequentially
(pure
striping).
Use for non-
critical data
that
requires
high
performanc
e.

High data
throughput
for large files.

No fault
tolerance. All
data lost if
any drive
fails.

One to
Four

No

1

Data
duplicated
on another
disk
(mirroring).
Use for
read-
intensive
fault
tolerant
systems

100 percent
data
redundancy

Double disk
space.
Reduced
performance
during
rebuilds.

Two

Yes

10

Data divided
in blocks
and
distributed
sequentially
and each
block is
duplicated
to another
disk.

100 percent
data
redundancy
and High data
throughput.

A minimum
of four drives
required.

Four

Yes

aa300.book Page 82 Tuesday, December 17, 2002 5:27 PM

This manual is related to the following products: