Simple RAID Cheat Sheet

Level Redundancy Disk Required Faster Reads Faster Writes

RAID 0 No 2 Yes Yes

RAID 1 Yes 2 Yes No

RAID 5 Yes 3 Yes No

RAID 10 Yes N*2 Yes Yes

JBOD No N/A No No

RAID 0

A RAID 0 (also known as a stripe set or striped volume) splits data evenly across two or more disks
(striped) with no parity information for redundancy. RAID 0 was not one of the original RAID levels and
provides no data redundancy. RAID 0 is normally used to increase performance, although it can also be
used as a way to create a small number of large virtual disks out of a large number of small physical
ones.

A RAID 0 can be created with disks of differing sizes, but the storage space added to the array by each
disk is limited to the size of the smallest disk. For example, if a 120 GB disk is striped together with a 100
GB disk, the size of the array will be 200 GB.
RAID 1
A RAID 1 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on two or more disks. This is useful when
read performance or reliability is more important than data storage capacity. Such an array can only be as
big as the smallest member disk. A classic RAID 1 mirrored pair contains two disks (see diagram), which
increases reliability geometrically over a single disk. Since each member contains a complete copy of the
data, and can be addressed independently, ordinary wear-and-tear reliability is raised by the power of the
number of self-contained copies.

RAID 5

A RAID 5 uses block-level striping with parity data distributed across all member disks. RAID 5 has
achieved popularity because of its low cost of redundancy. This can be seen by comparing the number of
drives needed to achieve a given capacity. For an array of n drives, with Smin being the size of the
smallest disk in the array, other RAID levels, which yield redundancy, give only a storage capacity
of Smin (for RAID 1), or (for RAID 1+0). In RAID 5, the yield is . For
example, four 1 TB drives can be made into a 1 TB redundant array under RAID 1 or 2 TB under RAID
1+0, but the same four drives can be used to build a 3 TB array under RAID 5. Although RAID 5 may be
implemented in a disk controller, some have hardware support for parity calculations (hardware RAID
cards with onboard processors) while some use the main system processor (a form of software RAID in
vendor drivers for inexpensive controllers). Many operating systems also provide software RAID support
independently of the disk controller, such as Windows Dynamic Disks, Linux mdadm, or RAID-Z. A
minimum of three disks is required for a complete RAID 5 configuration. In some implementations a
degraded RAID 5 disk set can be made (three disk set of which only two are online), while
mdadm supports a fully functional (non-degraded) RAID 5 setup with two disks - which function as a slow
RAID-1, but can be expanded with further volumes.
In the example, a read request for block A1 would be serviced by disk 0. A simultaneous read request for
block B1 would have to wait, but a read request for B2 could be serviced concurrently by disk 1.

RAID 10
RAID 10 is a "hybrid" or nested RAID configuration. It is commonly referred to as a "stripe of mirrors".

A multiple RAID level is created by splitting the disks into sets. Within each set, one RAID configuration is
applied, and then across the two sets, another RAID level is applied. Nested RAID configurations are
denoted as RAID XY, or equivalently, RAID X+Y, or RAID X/Y. For RAID 10, X is 1 and Y is 0, so each
set will have a RAID 1 configuration within it, and RAID 0 will be applied across the two sets.

It may be difficult to visualize this, so to illustrate, suppose you own 8 disks. The data is divided into
"blocks", and these blocks are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on. We generally split the disks into two sets,
so we will have 4 disks in each set. Here is what this will look like:
JBOD

JBOD, meaning "Just a Bunch of Drives" is used to refer to two distinct concepts:

 All disks being independently addressed, with no collective properties – each physical disk, with all
the logical partitions each may contain, being mapped to a different logical volume: just a bunch of
disks.
 Concatenation, where all the physical disks are concatenated and presented as a single disk.

Note that neither concept implies data redundancy. The usage is contentious; in careful usage, JBOD
refers to the first (independent disks), as there is no other term to refer to this, while concatenation is
referred to by unambiguous terms such as SPAN or BIG. For example, in the context of ZFS, JBOD
refers to independent drives.

The host controller of a JBOD setup may also impact how it can be used. A USB or FireWire host
connection will address multiple physical drives, but an eSATA connection requires a SATA host
controller with Port Multiplier support, or else it will only recognize the first physical disk.