Drive Arrays And Fault Tolerance; What Is A Drive Array - Compaq 166207-B21 - Smart Array 5302/32 RAID Controller User Manual

What Is a Drive Array?

The capacity and performance of a single physical (hard) drive is adequate for home
users. However, business users demand higher storage capacities, higher data transfer
rates, and greater protection against data loss when drives fail.
Connecting extra physical drives to a system increases the total storage capacity
(refer to Figure D-1), but has no effect on the efficiency of read/write (R/W)
operations. Data can still be transferred to only one physical drive at a time.
Figure D-1: Physical drives added to system
Compaq Smart Array 5300 Controller User Guide

Drive Arrays and Fault Tolerance

P1 P2
R/W
P3
D
D-1