Vivotek NR9581 - RAID Basics; RAID Configuration Components

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User's Manual - 41
RAID Basics
A Redundant Array of Independent Disks is an array, or group, of multiple independent physical
drives that provide high performance and fault tolerance. A RAID drive group improves I/O
performance and reliability. The RAID drive group appears to the host computer as a single
storage volume or as multiple virtual units. An I/O transaction is expedited because several
drives can be accessed simultaneously.
A RAID drive group improves data storage reliability and fault tolerance compared to single drive
storage. Data loss resulting from a drive failure can be prevented by reconstructing missing data
from the remaining drives. The benets of RAID come from the improvement of I/O performance
and the increased reliability.
What are the Virtual drives?
Virtual drives are drive groups that are available to the operating systems. The storage space in
a virrtual drive comes from all the members in the drive group.
The RAID functions available for virtual drives include:

Hot spare drives.

Drive group and virtual drive congurations.

Initializing one or more virtual drives.

Individual access to controllers, virtual drives, and disk drives.

Failed drive rebuild.

Verication of redundancy data in virtual drives using RAID levels 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60.

Reconstructing virtual drives after the RAID levels or adding a drive to a drive group.

Indepently selecting a host controller to work for.
RAID conguration components

Drive group: a group of physical drives. These drives will be managed in partitions known as
virtual drives.

Virtual drive: a partition in a drive group made of continguous data segments from the
individual disk drives. A virtual drive can consist of the following components:

An entire drive group.

More than one entire drive group.

A part of drive group.

Parts of more than one drive group.

A combination of any two of the conditions above.
For a RAID volume conguration, it is recommended you use hard drives of the same model
featuring the same capacity and rotation speed. It is also preferred that these drives are running
the same version of rmware.
IMPORTANT: