MaxAttach NAS 6000 Administration Guide
Managing RAID Arrays with Mylex RAID Controller and GAM
n
RAID Controller
n
SCSI Bus
n
GAM Server
n
GAM Client
n
Typical operations: create new arrays, add drives to new, add drives to existing,
n
free up drives from existing, create hot spare, reconfigure last in array,
reconfigure middle array
Introduction
Your Maxtor MaxAttach NAS 6000 Base unit comes configured with a set of standard
RAID 5 disk arrays that are ready to go after physical installation. If you want to configure
the system into other available configurations to suite your unique local needs, you should
have a understanding of disk array concepts including RAID or Redundant Arrays of
Independent Disks which forms the key methodology in the MaxAttach NAS 6000 system.
RAID - Redundant Array of Independent Disks
RAID Introduction and Overview
RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks which was developed to
optimize groups of hard disk drives to provide various combinations of:
n
greater storage capacity than a single physical disk,
better fault tolerance and data recovery capabilities in the event of a disk failure, and
n
faster transfer of the data to and from the disks.
n
A RAID array is a collection of drives which collectively act as a single storage system,
which can tolerate the failure of a drive without losing data, and which can operate
independently of each other.
Each level is a different way to spread data across multiple drives--a compromise between
cost and speed. Understanding these levels is important, because each level is optimized for
a different use.
The common RAID specifications are numbered from 0 to 5, although only RAID 0,
RAID 1, and RAID 5 are in current common use with current high performance disk
technology.
Chapter #11 - Appendix - Disk Array RAID Concepts
11/07/01 -- Revision 2.0.03A
Chapter #11 - Appendix - Disk Array RAID Concepts
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Introduction
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