The anatomy of RAID

RAID you said ? . What's that ? Residential Area Internet Device ? Rabbits And Ingenious Devices ? Well if you have to ask this question, you haven't read any of my past articles yet.

RAID is an acronym that stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Originally developed by a couple of whiz kids at Berkeley university as a graduation work, RAID has found its way in to prime time data servers. When you are reading this article ore browsing this web site you are actually accessing a RAID system. After all we too use RAID to increase the reliability of our web server.

The intention of RAID was to increase the reliability of standard disks and, at the same time, increase the data throughput spectacularly. A number of schemes were invented for that purpose. Initially some of these things could be done by the operating system, but it soon became clear that this was a job that could not be handled by the operating system alone. The burden caused by some of these techniques slowed down the system so much that the advantage of the RAID system was lost. RAID did not catch on until special controllers were created that could take on the task involved with the RAID implementation , and thus off-load this burden form the operating system.