RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives - is a method of using multiple hard drives together to provide larger capacity, higher speed access and / or data protection through redundancy. RAID can be accomplished through software, or it can be controlled by specialized hardware.

There are several levels of RAID:
RAID 0 or "striping" creates one large volume out of two hard drives by alternating data writes between the two drives. This provides faster access, because the duties are shared between the two hard drives. RAID 0 also has a higher risk of failure, because there is no redundancy, and if there is an error on either of the two drives, all the data on both drives can be lost.

RAID 1 or "mirroring" creates two identical drives, mirrors of each other, whatever is written to the main drive is also immediately written to the mirror drive. This protects against a hardware failure of one drive. RAID 1 is not a substitute for a data backup plan however, because whatever is done to the data on the main drive (such as accidental deletion, file corruption or virus damage) is also done to the mirror. As with RAID 0, RAID 1 is intended to work with two identical hard drives. RAID 1 gives you a net volume size of 1/2 of the space of the two drives - for example two 500 GB drives in RAID 1 would give a 500 GB volume.

RAID 5 and other levels of RAID use three or more drives to provide a mixture of striping for speed, and redundancy for safety. In a RAID 5 array, one drive out of the set is used as a checksum drive, which provides the information so that if any one of the drives in the RAID array fails, the data can be rebuilt onto a replacement drive. The usable size of a RAID 5 array depends on how many drives are in the set, for example if four 500 GB drives are used, one of them will be the checksum drive, so the size of the RAID volume will be 1,500 MB.

Multi-bay drive enclosures don't have to be used as a RAID array, they can be used simply as individual disks. This is a good approach for data backup and for large projects like graphics, audio and video. Our removeable-cartridge enclosures from Firmtek, Sonnet, Raidon and Wiebetech allow you to swap individual drives in and out, so a backup can be made and carried offsite, and major projects can have their own dedicated hard drive. This allows for virtually infinite storage, you can add more drives as you need them.

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