IDE RAID Comparison

Other Configurations

All numbers between 0 and 7 have a RAID type associated with them, however most of the other RAID types are not used often. RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5 have become popular on the market because of the advantages they offer over a single drive or a series of drives.

It is important to note that there are also combinations of these setups that some cards support. Usually their name describes what they are. For example, RAID 0+1 incorporates the striping of data over two drives and the mirroring of data over another pair of drives (thus requiring at least four drives).

Stripe Sizes

We suspect that many of you out there are interested in RAID for its performance advantage. Stripe sizes play a very important role in the performance of RAID arrays and thus it is critical to understand the concept of striping before we delve any further into RAID discussion.

As we mentioned before, stripes are blocks of a single file that are broken into smaller pieces. The stripe size, or the size that the data is broken into, is user definable and can range from 1KB to 1024KB or more. The way it works is when data is passed to the RAID controller, it is divided by the stripe size to create 1 or more blocks. These blocks are then distributed among drives in the array, leaving different pieces on different drives.

Like we discussed before, the information can be written faster because it is as if the hard drive is writing a smaller file, although it is really only writing pieces of a large file. At the same time, reading the data is faster because the blocks of data can be read off of all the drives in the array at the same time, so reading back a large file may only require the reading of two smaller files on two different hard drives at the same time.

There is quite a bit of debate surrounding what stripe size is best. Some claim that the smaller the stripe the better, because this ensures that no matter how small the original data is it will be distributed across the drives. Others claim that larger stripes are better since the drive is not always being taxed to write information.

To understand how a RAID card reacts to different stripe sizes, let's use the most drastic cases as examples. We will assume that there are 2 drives setup in a RAID 0 stripe array that has one of two stripe sizes: a 2KB stripe and a 1024KB stripe. To demonstrate how the stripe sizes influence the reading and writing of data, we will use also use two different data sizes to be written and read: a 4KB file and a 8192KB file.

On the first RAID 0 array with a 2KB stripe size, the array is happy to receive the 4KB file. When the RAID controller receives this data, it is divided into two 2KB blocks. Next, one of the 2KB blocks is written to the first disk in the array and the second 2KB blocks is written to the second disk in the array. This, in theory, divides the work that a single hard drive would have to do in half, since the hard drives in the array only have to write a single 2KB file each.

When reading back, the outcome is just as pretty. If the original 4KB file is needed, both hard drives in the array move to and read a single 2KB block to reconstruct the 4KB file. Since each hard drive works independently and simultaneously, the speed of reading the 4KB file back should be the same as reading a single 2KB file back.

This pretty picture changes into a nightmare when we try to write the 8192KB file. In this case, to write the file, the RAID controller must break it into no less than 4096 blocks, each 2KB in size. From here, the RAID card must pass pairs of the blocks to the drives in the array, wait for the drive to write the information, and then send the next 2KB blocks. This process is repeated 4096 times and the extra time required to perform the breakups, send the information in pieces, and move the drive actuator to various places on the disk all add up to an extreme bottleneck.

Reading the information back is just as painful. To recreate the 8192KB file, the RAID controller must gather information from 4096 places on each drive. Once again, moving the hard drive head to the appropriate position 4096 times is quite time consuming.

Now let's move to the same array with a 1024KB stripe size. When writing a 4KB file, the RAID array in this case does essentially nothing. Since 4 is not divisible by 1024 in a whole number, the RAID controller just takes the 4KB file and passes it to one of the drives on the array. The data is not split, or striped, because of the large stripe size and therefore the performance in this instance should be identical to that of a single drive.

Reading back the file results in the same story. Since the data is only stored on one drive in our array, reading back the information from the array is just like reading back the 4KB file from a single disk.

The RAID 0 array with the 1024KB stripe size does better when it comes to the 8192KB file. Here, the 8192KB file is broken into eight blocks of 1024KB in size. When writing the data, both drives in the array receive 4 blocks of the data meaning that each drive only has the task of writing four 1024KB files. This increase the writing performance of the array, since the drives work together to write a small number of blocks. At the same time reading back the file requires four 1024KB files to be read back from each drive. This holds a distinct advantage over reading back a single 8192KB file.

As you can see, the performance of various stripe sizes differ greatly depending on the situation. Just what stripe size should you use? For once we will actually be able to answer that question in just a few moments.