#softwareraid

Whether you need hardware RAID depends on your usage needs and data importance. If you want to save money (who doesn't?), then you can use a single operating system to access the RAID array, or you are using RAID 0 or RAID 1, then using software RAID can have the same RAID protection and experience instead of higher-cost similar products.

If uptime and stability are important to you or your business, hardware RAID is very useful. Backup will help you to avoid catastrophic data loss. However, restoring large amounts of data (for example, in the event of a drive failure) may take several hours to perform. Hardware RAID allows you to withstand the failure of one or more drives without losing data and in many cases without causing any downtime. Hardware RAID is also useful if you are experiencing speed issues in multitasks, when applications are waiting to perform tasks on disk. By using hardware RAID, you can ensure that the high-speed array reads and writes data at a high speed, thereby providing you with additional throughput. In addition, if you use hardware RAID, the hardware RAID controller will include additional memory as a cache, which reduces the burden on the physical hardware and improves overall performance.

RAID is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into one or more logical units for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both. Data is distributed across the drives in one of several ways, referred to as RAID levels, depending on the required level of redundancy and performance. The different schemes, or data distribution layouts, are named by the word "RAID" followed by a number, for example RAID 0 or RAID 1. Each scheme, or RAID level, provides a different balance among the key goals: reliability, availability, performance, and capacity. RAID levels greater than RAID 0 provide protection against unrecoverable sector read errors, as well as against failures of whole physical drives. The different modes (mirroring, striping and parity) are used to define the different RAID levels. Processing is required to carry out those actions, and that can take place on the host server's OS or in the storage array or controller which also called software RAID or hardware RAID. So, what are the pros and cons of software RAID vs. hardware RAID? Please stay tuned our updates in the next few days.