User Guide

AMD-RAIDXpert2 User Guide
53987 Rev. 3.01 June 2016
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Arrays, Disks and RAID Levels
Chapter 3
Chapter 3 Arrays, Disks and RAID Levels
3.1 Understanding Arrays
Arrays are several disks that are grouped together to improve either the performance or reliability
of a storage system. Because some RAID levels enhance performance while others improve
reliability, it is important to consider the user’s needs when planning an array configuration.
Note: It is highly recommended that this user manual be reviewed in its entirety before
configuring arrays. Some of the advanced features of RAIDXpert2 (such as sparing options)
must be understood by the user before creating arrays.
3.2 RAID Levels
RAIDXpert2 supports the RAID levels indicated in Table 6.
Table 6. RAID Levels – General Characteristics
RAID Level
Main Characteristic
Use/Usefulness
RAID0 (Striping)
 Provides the highest performance
but no data redundancy. Data in
the array is striped (distributed)
across several disks.
 Supports 2-8 disks.
RAID0 arrays are useful for holding
information, such as the operating
system paging file, where performance
is extremely important but redundancy
is not.
RAID1
(Mirroring)
 Mirrors data on a partition of one
disk to another.
 Supports 2 disks.
Useful when there are only two disks
available and data integrity is more
important than storage capacity.