In this article I will explain common Raid(Redundunt array of idependent drives) setups, what they do, and what they are good for.

Disclaimer: This is a simple explanation there may be some specific details missed in this article.

Raid 0
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Raid 0 also known as a striped array, this is when you have mutliple drives and when a file is written to them, they take a fraction of the file, this greatly increases write speeds and allows all drives to keep their full capacity. To make it more simple let me give an example.

Lets say you have 2 drives each with a 15G capcity. In raid 0 you will still have access to the full 30G of storage. Say a 10M file is written to the striped array of drives, each drive will take a fraction of this file, so in this example that is 5M. This meens multiple parts of the file can be written at the same time greatly increasing write speeds.

But normally these drives will be the same capacity but say for example one is 120G and the other is 360G. Your max stroage would be 120G x 2 = 240G.

Pros

High speeds
Keep full capacity

Cons

No redundancy on its own
If one drive dies all data is corrupted

Raid 1
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Raid 1 also known as a mirrored array is when you have multiple drives and they all mirror eachother, this means if I have 2 drives and one dies I still have all the data on the drive that is left over. But no matter how many dirves you add you keep the same storage capacity.

Pros

Great Redudency

Cons

You only get one drives worth of storage

Raid 5
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Raid 5 also known as a Parity Array is when you have n number of drives and the capacity you get is n-1. This extra space allows for parity that can rebuild the data of up to one drive if it is corrupted.

So for example lets say I have 10 drives at a capacity of 5G each. My max capacity would be 45G.

Only one drives data can be recovered. So if two fail then you can’t recover the data.

Pros