Portable Media Storage User Manual

RAIDBank5 Owner’s Manual

Chapter 2. Understanding RAID

The RAIDBank5 controller subsystem is a high-performance SATA2 drive bus disk array

controller. When properly configured, the RAIDBank5 can provide non-stop service with

a high degree of fault tolerance through the use of RAID technology and advanced array

management features.

The RAIDBank5 can be configured to RAID levels 0, 1, 10, 3, and 5, as well as disk spans

and direct mapping. RAID levels other than 0 are able to tolerate a hard disk failure without

impact on the existing data, and failed drive data can be reconstructed from the remaining

data and parity drives. RAID configuration and monitoring is accessible through the LCD

front control panel or the built in web administration interface. The RAIDBank5 features the

following high availability functions:

• RAID Levels 0,1,10,3,5, disk spans, and direct mapping Support

• Up to 4 discrete LUN support

• Online Capacity Expansion

• Online RAID Level Migration

• Logical Drive Capacity Extension

• Array Roaming

• Automatic Drive Failure Detection

• Automatic Failed Drive Rebuilding

• Hot Spare Disk Drives

• Instant Availability/Background Initialization.

This section will help you gain understanding of how these functions can serve your needs best.

RAID

RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It is an array of multiple

independent hard disk drives that provide high performance and fault tolerance through

support of several levels of the Berkeley RAID techniques. An appropriate RAID level is

selected when the volume sets are defined or created, and is based on disk capacity, data

availability (fault tolerance or redundancy), and disk performance considerations. The

RAIDBank5 controller makes the RAID implementation and the disks’ physical configuration

transparent to the host operating system, which means that the host operating system drivers

and software utilities are not affected regardless of the RAID level selected.

2-Understanding RAID

FYI:

The Berkeley RAID levels are a family of

disk array data protection and mapping

techniques described by Garth Gibson, Randy Katz,

and David Patterson in papers written while they

were performing research into I/O subsystems at

the University of California at Berkeley. There are

six Berkeley RAID Levels, usually referred to by the

names RAID Level 1, etc., through RAID Level 6.