RAIDers of the disk

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Ok, that headline is not my best work. Enterprise Storage Forum ran an article over the holidays that I found interesting. I’m not a storage guy, and I’ve never been an admin, so I found the introduction and review of the major RAID levels and their features helpful in reducing my fear of the storage admins at my site. I did not know there was a RAID 50. Or 10 for that matter.

With the rise of NAS and SAN storage appliances, the skill set of getting down to the physical storage level and tweaking it to meet the needs of the system in question are rapidly disappearing. This is not a good thing. Just because we are offloading storage to external devices does not change the fact that we need to fundamentally understand our storage and configure it to meet the specific needs of our systems.

…There are others, like RAID 0, that only should be used in rare circumstances when you really understand your drive subsystem needs. RAID 50 and 51 are used as well but far less commonly and are not nearly as effectively. Ten years ago RAID 1 and RAID 5 were common, but today we have more options.

It’s a good read.