

The read and write performance will probably not increase for sequential or random reads/writes.Most partitions save their structure at the beginning and/or end of the volume, so if first and/or last disk fails, the whole volume is almost assuredly lost. You may be able to recover some data if the failed disk is in the middle of the volume, since the filesystem will just be missing one large consecutive chunk of data. If one disk fails, you will most likely lose all your data. In fact, size doesn't matter at all here. :) The size of the volume will be (roughly) equal to the total size of all the disks. The disks do not have to be of the same size. The disks are "appended" to each other, so writing linearly to the RAID device will fill up disk 0 first, then disk 1 and so on. Two or more disks are combined into one volume.Also known as as "span" or "JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks)".
#What is msi software raid drivers
The current RAID drivers in Linux support the following levels:

You can safely skip this section if you know RAID already. Some of this is absolutely basic RAID information, but a few notices have been added about what's special in the Linux implementation of the levels. Here's a short description of what is supported in the Linux RAID drivers. The downside is the loss of abstraction this entails. The idea is that the more the filesystem knows about the underlying hardware the more it can optimise access to the hardware. Other features are available but are experimental. At time of writing (2016) btrfs supports combining disks, mirroring, and snapshots (backups). Modern filesystems such as btrfs have set out to obsolete traditional RAID. Obviously this depends on a lot of things, but this is another reason for going down the RAID route. This facility is sometimes used for backups - remove one of the disks from the array and store it safely, replacing it with another disk.īecause storing multiple copies can be very wasteful of space, other forms of raid store parity along with the data, so that if a drive fails, the contents of that drive can be calculated from the other drives.įor most versions of RAID you will see a performance boost. Some forms of RAID store multiple copies of the data, so if you lose a disk, you have an identical copy elsewhere. In the author's opinion, unless you combine these with some other form of RAID, you're better off just buying a bigger disk. They do not protect your data - indeed, they increase the risk because failure of one drive will lose the data on all the drives. Some forms of RAID allow you to combine disks together to increase the apparent contiguous size. Especially if you buy "inexpensive" disks, which are often not suitable for use in a RAID. Not all modern RAID layouts will protect you against even a single disk failure, and with today's large drives, failures often cascade from one drive to another. What RAID is not, is a substitute for decent backups and a proper monitoring regime. The intention of RAID is to spread your data across several disks, such that a single disk failure will not lose that data. The general consensus is that "Independent" came first, and "Inexpensive" followed. RAID stands for either Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, depending on who you talk to.
