Standard RAID levels

I needed to put this information somewhere for easy access.

striping

different parts are on different harddisks, advantage: faster, as accessing several disks at once to gather all, disadvantage: a failure causes the entire data to be unrecoverable.

mirroring

an exact copy over multiple harddisks

parity

parity bits help check that the data is unlikely to have faults, see checksum. Can even be used to in cases to recover from faults.

Different RAID levels

RAID 0

striping, increased performance without parity information, redundancy, or fault tolerance

RAID 1

mirroring, no striping or parity

RAID 2

mostly unused, academic

RAID 3

byte-level striping with a parity disk

RAID 4

block-level striping with a dedicated parity disk

RAID 5

block-level striping with distributed parity

RAID 6

block-level striping with two parity blocks distributed across all member disks

RAID 10

raid 1 and 0 together

The Wikipedia article in the references provides more in depth information.

It is obvious for my use that I am solely interested in RAID 1, the mirroring solution.

My primary reason is the fault tolerance of data. The fact that reads perform better is not a big thing, and the disadvantage of space inefficiency I'll accept.

References

Wikipedia - Standard RAID levels

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels