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automatically take the place of any drive that fails in a
redundant unit. Used with RAID 1, 5, 10 and 50.
. The process of exchanging a drive without having
Hot Swap
to shut down the system. This is useful when you need to
exchange a degraded drive. It is also useful if you want to add
disk drives to configure into a unit without shutting down the
system first.
Configurations Available with the 3ware RAID Controller
The following RAID levels and configurations are available for
drives attached to a 3ware RAID controller:
. Provides striping, but no mirroring or redundancy of
RAID 0
any kind. Striped disk arrays achieve high transfer rates
because they can read and write data on more than one drive
simultaneously. The stripe size is configurable in 3ware BIOS
Manager (3BM). Requires a minimum of two drives.
When drives are configured in a striped disk array, large files
are distributed across the multiple disks using RAID 0
techniques.
Striped disk arrays give exceptional performance, particularly
for data intensive applications such as video editing, computer-
aided design and geographical information systems.
RAID 0 arrays are not fault tolerant; the loss of any drive
results in the loss of all the data in that array, and can even
cause a system hang, depending on your operating system.
RAID 0 arrays are not recommended for high availability
systems unless additional precautions are taken to prevent
system hangs and data loss.
. Also known as a mirrored array. Mirroring is done on
RAID 1
pairs of drives. Mirrored disk arrays write data to two drives
using RAID 1 algorithms. This gives your system fault
tolerance by preserving the data on one drive if the other drive
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Understanding RAID Concepts and Levels
29
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