There are other posts from my fellow Storage Advisors that go into the gory details of RAID, its importance, and the varying levels of RAID available to customers today. This post is far less technical than that and more literal. To that I ask: When is RAID not RAID?

Let’s first start out by examining the acronym “RAID”. Since RAID stands for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks” you’d think that all RAID levels are “Redundant”, right? Wrong! RAID level 0 (zero) has no redundancy at all. In fact RAID 0, although having the RAID characteristic of stripping data across all disks, does not maintain any redundancy or parity of data.

With this epiphany I decided to examine this a bit closer. If I break down RAID 0 literally I think we may find the answer to this mysterious use of the term RAID 0. I think we can all generally agree that the number 0 (zero) in mathematical terms usually refers to nothing. If I have zero dollars, I don’t have any money at all. So with that I make the most simplistic conjecture that RAID 0, although not redundant is accurate! How is that you say? Well, (using the zero money statement above as a guide) if I have zero RAID, then I don’t have any RAID at all… right?

So there you have it. Although misleading due to the “R” part of RAID, I think I’ve successfully rationalized my way to satisfaction – at least when it comes to RAID 0. When is RAID not RAID? When it’s RAID 0! Or did I decide that it was RAID? Oh well – until next time.

Joe

This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2005 and is filed under Storage Interconnects & RAID, Advisor - Joe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.