Various types of RAID sets with Addonics Controllers

Various RAID sets which can be created using Addonics host controllers and adapters.

Parity RAID (RAID 5)

Parity RAID adds fault tolerance to Disk Striping by including parity information with the data. Parity RAID dedicates the equivalent of one disk for storing parity stripes. Parity RAID uses less capacity for protection, reducing cost per megabyte for larger installations. Parity RAID is suitable for accounting, payroll, or any application requiring fault tolerance in storage system for high availability.

Striped RAID (RAID 0, FAST)

Increased throughput with the addition of every drive. The capacity of a RAID 0 volume is the storage space of the smallest drive in the RAID set multiplied by the number of drives in the RAID set. Best for high data transfer requirements such as high definition video editing/encoding, OS boot drive for improved standard operation performance, high resolution image editing.
No fault tolerance. The failure of a single drive will cause the entire RAID set to drop out of the array and unable to rebuild the array. Recommended only for high transfer and operation speeds, with little value as a backup solution.

Mirrored RAID (RAID 1, SAFE)

Provides fault tolerance ability by mirroring the capacity of the smallest of two or more drives. A common backup solution for lower capacity backup requirements. Any drive in the RAID 1 set can be used independently from the other drives. Redundant data can be rebuilt with only a single drive not failed in the RAID set. RAID 1 is suitable for backup solutions with less storage requirements and lower data transfer raterequirements.
Requires two or more drives without any increase in storage space. The capacity will still be the amount of the smallest drive multiplied by two no matter how many drives are in the RAID 1 set. Because of this, RAID 1 is only suitable for lower storage requirements due to the limited size of the latest physical disks (currently 1TB). RAID 1 implementation will neither increase nor decrease the performance of the drives in the RAID set.

Mirrored-Striped (RAID 10)

Benefit of both high performance and fault tolerance from RAID 0 and 1. The capacity will be the amount of the smallest drive multiplied by two.

BIG (Concatenation)

Concatenation combines the capacity of drives for increased storage in a single volume. Unlike RAID 0, the drives are joined "back to back", so the full capacity of each drive is combined together rather than only the capacity of the smallest drive. The failure of a drive in a concatenation usually ends up with the loss of only the failed drive, but special tools would be required to recover data from the other drives.
Large possible logical drive capacity, yet no fault tolerance, and no increase in data transfer speed.

JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks)

JBOD allows the drives to be detected by the system as individual physical volumes. Drives are not combined, so there is no redundancy.

SAFE50

Creates two volumes across two drives, with half of each physical drive being allocated to each volume. One volume is in SAFE mode (RAID 1) and the other is in BIG ( Concatenated) mode.

SAFE33

Creates two volumes, with 1/3 of physical space being dedicated to SAFE mode and 2/3 to BIG mode.

GUI

The GUI setting allows configuration of RAID setting to be performed using the included software rather than the rotary switch. 2x1 eSATA / USB 2.0 Hardware Port Multiplier must be connected onto a PM-aware host controller (such as controllers using SiI3132 or SiI3124 chip) or through USB 2.0 to use this option. GUI allows more flexibility than the rotary switch, such as allowing creation of RAID volumes with different drive capacities on different RAID sets. When the rotary switch is configured as GUI, a new option "Configure Box" will appear in the SteelVine Manager to manage RAID through the software.