RAID a.k.a. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks is a storage system. People came up with this idea because I/O operations can be bottlenecks sometimes. By using multiple disks for one logical disk, it can work in a better way.

💡 Work it harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger - Daft Punk

Yes, we want our disk to be ‘Working harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger’. We need to think about three things here:

• Capacity - as large as possible!
• Reliability - tolerant to system failures!
• Performance - as fast as possible!

Note that RAIDs are made to be ‘transparent’. It means that from the outside it works the same as what a regular disk does, so we won’t need to update our software for RAIDs.

💡 You can think of transparency as an abstraction. It means that some detailed information about the system is hidden from the outside.

Fault Model

Some locations of your hard disk might be out of order. Let’s assume we use the fail-stop fault model. fail-stop fault model is a system following these conditions:

• The system can be in either two states: working or failing.
• If it has failed, the system can detect the failure and can stop.

Basically, we are assuming that all systematic failures can be detected. Note that the fault model affects reliability.

RAID Level 0: Striping

It’s actually not a RAID because it doesn’t have any redundancy.

💡 Redundancy is an engineering term referring to the inclusion of extra components in case of system failures.

We call it ‘striping’ because we can read/write multiple blocks of the same row from the different disks at the same time.

Chunk Sizes

If the chunk sizes are bigger, a file would be split into a few chunks, leading to less positioning time and less parallelism. If

the chunk sizes are smaller, a file would be split into a lot of chunks, and the parallelism and the positioning time would increase.

Evaluating RAID-0

• Performance

• Time to process workload = Seek time + Rotational delay + Transfer to transfer data
• S = sequential workload processing rate
• R = random workload processing rate
• N = (the number of accesses)

Sequential read: N*S
Sequential write: N*S
Random read: N*R
Random write: N*R

• Capability

We can use the entire disk space for storing the actual data so its capability is great.

B: the number of blocks
Capability: N * B

• Reliability

It cannot deal with any disk failures, since striping doesn’t have any backup methods. Therefore, it has poor reliability.

RAID Level 1: Mirroring

Mirroring has original disks and copy disks. The copy disks copy the contents of the original disks. For example, the contents of Disk 0 are the same as Disk 1.

Evaluating RAID-1

• Performance

• Sequential read: S/2 * N (Depending on the workload, you might need to skip every other block. So it takes twice the positioning times)
• Sequential write: S/2 * N (Same as sequential read)
• Random read: R * N (The positioning time doesn't get affected since the workload is given randomly)
• Random write: R/2 * N (One logical write takes two physical writes)

• Capability

We can use half of the entire disk space so it’s not a good choice if you think about capability.

Capability: N/2 * B

• Reliability

It can handle single disk failure for each block So it is more reliable than RAID-0

RAID Level 4: With Parity

RAID Level 4 uses one of the disks for parity bits. The XOR operation makes this possible. See below.

C0, C1, C2, and C3 represent the bits at the same position on each disk.

Let’s say there’s no disk failure at this position. Since C0 == C1 and C2 == C3, the result of XOR is always 0. If there is one system failure, either C0 != C1 or C2 != C3, the result of XOR becomes 1. RAID can detect a disk failure by looking at the parity disk.

Here’s an interesting fact: XOR keeps the number of 1s even. For example, look at this table.

Imagine one bit(C2) in a row is lost. How can we reconstruct the answer?

By XOR all of the rest. C2 would be 0 if the number of 1s are even, otherwise 1. XOR(C0,C1,C3,P) = XOR(0,0,1,0) == 1. There we go

Evaluating RAID-4

• Performance

Sequential read: (N - 1) * S (one for parity disk)
Sequential write: (N - 1) * S (optimistic-writing in parallel and updating the parity bit)
Random read: (N - 1) * R
Random write: R/2 (two writes and reads in parallel)

When it comes to random write we get the value of the new parity using this formula: P(new) = (C(old) ^ C(new)) ^ P(old). C(old) and C(new) are same, P(new) should be P(old). However, if C(old) and C(new) are different, P(new) should be different from P(old). Since this logical operation takes two reads(old ones) and two writes(write) in parallel, the rate of random write is R/2, which is extremely slow. This problem is referred to as ‘slow write problem’

• Capability

It uses one disk for parity back, which is for pure protection. You can see it’s better than mirroring

Capability: (N - 1) * B

• Reliability

It can handle single disk failure for each block So it is as reliable as RAID-2

RAID-5

You could see that random write of RAID-4 is very slow. To overcome this, people came out with the upgraded version: RAID-5.

Evaluating RAID-5

• Performance

Sequential read: (N - 1) * S (one for parity disk)
Sequential write: (N - 1) * S (optimistic-writing in parallel and updating the parity bit)
Random read: N * R
Random write: R/4 * N (two writes and reads in parallel. But if there are enough workload you can say each disk deals with 4 accesses for one logical access.)

Conclusion

• If your workload is sequential only, think about using RAID-1
• If your workload is random or mixed, think about using RAID-5

This post is a remake of three easy pieces. If there’s any copyright issues, please let me know!