Aging RAID still an effective protection technology - Storage Technology Magazine

Aging RAID still an effective protection technology

RAID has taken some knocks lately, like criticism that it's a nearly 30-year-old technology that can't stand up to the rigors of a modern data storage environment. But 96% of the respondents to our survey said they rely on some form of RAID.

RAID has taken some knocks lately, like criticism that it's a nearly 30-year-old technology that can't stand up to the rigors of a modern data storage environment. But maybe it's been around so long because it's so good: 96% of respondents to our survey rely on some form of RAID. The most-used RAID configuration isn't much of a surprise, as 87% use RAID 5, followed by RAID 1 (52%) and RAID 10 (40%). Seventy-five percent of RAID users employ more than one type on RAID on their storage systems, and nearly 20% juggle four different RAID configurations in their shops. But that's not to suggest users are totally enamored with RAID, as their two biggest gripes are inefficient use of disk capacity (36%) and lengthy rebuild times (32%); however, 10% of respondents didn't see any particular shortcomings. RAID appears to be doing its job well: 72% had to perform RAID rebuilds at least once in the last year and although rebuilds took a little while (54% said three hours to 12 hours), 93% reported that they didn't lose any data. To quote one respondent: "RAID rocks!"

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"We spin about 500 TB of array storage and have yet to experience negative issues in our environment that can be attributed to RAID devices." Survey respondent



BIO: Rich Castagna (rcastagna@storagemagazine.com) is editorial director of the Storage Media Group.

This was first published in September 2010

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