Overview Of Raid Levels - Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 SP2 - STORAGE ADMINISTRATION GUIDE 05-15-2009 Administration Manual

Feature
RAID processing
RAID levels
Component devices

6.1.2 Overview of RAID Levels

The following table describes the advantages and disadvantages of the RAID levels supported by
EVMS. The description assumes that the component devices reside on different disks and that each
disk has its own dedicated I/O capability.
IMPORTANT: For information about creating complex or nested RAID devices with mdadm, see
Chapter 7, "Managing Software RAIDs 6 and 10 with mdadm," on page
RAID Levels Supported by EVMS
Table 6-2
RAID Level Description
0
1
4
76 SLES 10 SP2: Storage Administration Guide
Linux Software RAID
In the host server's processor
0, 1, 4, 5, and 10 plus the
raid10
Disks from same or different disk
array
Stripes data using a round-
robin method to distribute
data over the RAID's
component devices.
Mirrors data by copying
blocks of one disk to another
and keeping them in
continuous synchronization.
If disks are different sizes,
the smallest disk determines
the size of the RAID.
Stripes data and records
parity to a dedicated disk. If
disks are different sizes, the
smallest disk determines the
size of the RAID.
mdadm
Performance and Fault Tolerance
Improves disk I/O performance for both reads and writes.
Actual performance depends on the stripe size, the actual
data, and the application.
Does not provide disk fault tolerance and data redundancy.
Any disk failure causes all data in the RAID to be lost.
Improves disk reads by making multiple copies of data
available via different I/O paths. The write performance is
about the same as for a single disk because a copy of the
data must be written to each of the disks in the mirror.
Provides 100% data redundancy. If one disk fails then the
data remains available on its mirror, and processing
continues.
Improves disk I/O performance for both reads and writes.
Write performance is considerably slower than for RAID 0,
because parity must be calculated and written. Write
performance is slightly slower than RAID 5. Read
performance is slower than for a RAID 1 array with the same
number of component devices. The dedicated parity disk can
become a bottleneck for writing parity.
Provides disk fault tolerance. If a disk fails, performance is
degraded while the RAID uses the parity to reconstruct data
for the replacement disk.
Hardware RAID
RAID controller on the disk array
Varies by vendor
Same disk array
97.