RAID stands for redundant array of independent disks. RAID is a data storage mechanism that uses multiple physical storage disks that are work together as a single virtual drive. Data is spread across all the physical disks. There are several RAID configurations, called RAID levels.
RAID 5 configuration
The definition of a RAID 5 storage system, according to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is:
A placement policy using parity-based protection for storing stripes of 'n' logical blocks of data and one logical block of parity across a set of 'n+1' independent storage devices where the parity and data blocks are interleaved across the storage devices. Data stored using this form of RAID is able to survive a single storage device failure without data loss.
In a RAID 5 configuration, data is striped — i.e., split and stored across multiple physical disks. In addition, a special parity block is used for redundancy. For each combination of data blocks in RAID 5, a parity block is calculated and stored. Each individual parity block resides on only one disk; however, parity blocks are stored in a round-robin fashion, distributed equally across all the physical disks.
Example of a RAID 5 configuration. Data and parity blocks are grouped by color to easily identify which parity block is associated with which data blocks.
Considering that data blocks are striped across at least two disks and the parity block is written on a separate disk, we can see that a RAID 5 configuration requires at least 3 physical drives.
RAID0 无冗余容错,只是实现了磁盘阵列存放数据的带状分布,提高了大规模数据访问的性能。
RAID1 镜像容错,在数据写入一个磁盘的时候,同时在另一个磁盘做相应的镜像备份。磁盘利用率低(只有 50%)。
RAID5 奇偶校验,实现了单个磁盘的冗余纠错功能,大大提高了磁盘利用率。