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Fundamental to RAID technology is striping. This is a method of combining multiple drives into one logical storage unit. Striping partitions the storage space of each drive into stripes, which can be as small as one sector (512 bytes) or as large as several megabytes. These stripes are then interleaved in a rotating sequence, so that the combined space is composed alternately of stripes from each drive. The specific type of operating environment determines whether large or small stripes should be used. Most operating systems today support concurrent disk I/O operations across multiple drives. However, in order to maximize throughput for the disk subsystem, the I/O load must be balanced across all the drives so that each drive can be kept busy as much as possible. In a multiple drive system without striping, the disk I/O load is never perfectly balanced. Some drives will contain data files that are frequently accessed and some drives will rarely be accessed. Striping Disk DrivesBy striping the drives in the array with stripes large enough so that each record falls entirely within one stripe, most records can be evenly distributed across all drives. This keeps all drives in the array busy during heavy load situations. This situation allows all drives to work concurrently on different I/O operations, and thus maximize the number of simultaneous I/O operations that can be performed by the array Click Here For More RAID Information |
What Is RAID? |