User's Manual

Understanding RAID Concepts 37
Choosing RAID Levels and Concatenation
You can use RAID or concatenation to control data storage on multiple disks.
Each RAID level or concatenation has different performance and data
protection characteristics.
The following sub-sections provide specific information on how each RAID
level or concatenation store data as well as their performance and protection
characteristics:
• Concatenation
• RAID Level 0 (Striping)
• RAID Level 1 (Mirroring)
• RAID Level 5 (Striping with distributed parity)
• RAID Level 6 (Striping with additional distributed parity)
• RAID Level 50 (Striping over RAID 5 sets)
• RAID Level 60 (Striping over RAID 6 sets)
• RAID Level 10 (Striping over mirror sets)
• RAID Level 1-Concatenated (Concatenated mirror)
• Comparing RAID Level and Concatenation Performance
•No-RAID
Concatenation
In Storage Management, concatenation refers to storing data on either one
physical disk or on disk space that spans multiple physical disks. When
spanning more than one disk, concatenation enables the operating system to
view multiple physical disks as a single disk.
Data stored on a single disk can be considered a simple volume. This disk
could also be defined as a virtual disk that comprises only a single physical
disk. Data that spans more than one physical disk can be considered a
spanned volume. Multiple concatenated disks can also be defined as a virtual
disk that comprises more than one physical disk.
A dynamic volume that spans to separate areas of the same disk is also
considered concatenated.