RAID storage systems and RAID technology have grown and changed over the years. And while RAID is often labeled as having outdated concepts, data storage manufacturers have stepped up and modified RAID technology to fit the needs of today's users.

To fill you in on the most current updates to RAID, we've collected our top tips and articles on RAID storage systems. Read how the technology has evolved with wide striping and erasure coding. Find out how to manage data storage capacity on RAID. Discover why erasure codes are the foundation of RAID 6 technology. And learn how RAID technology fits into self-healing systems. For more information on RAID storage systems, check out SearchStorage.com's RAID storage technology topics section.

RAID technology advances with wide striping and erasure coding
The RAID storage systems of 2011 are very different from the RAID systems first developed in the 1980s. Newer technologies such as wide striping, storage virtualization and erasure coding are changing the face of RAID, allowing the technology to evolve to fit the needs of today's data storage systems. Read more about RAID technology advances.

Managing data storage capacity on RAID
With data stores growing rapidly, it's becoming harder and harder to keep up with managing data storage capacity on RAID. Storage managers have come to accept there will be a number of disk errors per unit of capacity and that RAID 5, which was designed to overcome those errors, is having trouble keeping up with them. To address these issues, new technologies such as bit-patterned media and heat-assisted magnetic recording have emerged. Learn more about these new technologies and how they can help to manage RAID data storage capacity issues.

Erasure codes: The foundation of RAID 6 arrays
More and more RAID storage systems, such as RAID 6, are trying to be more flexible and to increase their disk capacity. This means traditional parity is typically no longer used; instead, it's being replaced with erasure codes. Erasure codes add more reliability to a storage system because they create a mathematical function that describes a set of numbers that can be checked for accuracy and recover data if it's lost. Learn more about erasure codes and how they fit into RAID 6.

Self-healing systems and RAID technology
With self-healing systems, vendors work to provide users with products that allow them to do little or no maintenance on their systems, as well as heal hard disk drives (HDDs) when they fail. Each vendor tackles these tasks, as well as data migration, recovery and disk repair, differently. Take a look at the various self-healing systems and their approaches to using RAID technology.

This was first published in February 2011

Join the conversationComment

Share
Comments

    Results

    Contribute to the conversation

    All fields are required. Comments will appear at the bottom of the article.
    Back to top