RAID Terminology
One of the most confusing parts of system administration is its terminology. Misnomers often obscure simple topics, making it hard to search for documentation and even harder to locate relevant software. This has unfortunately been the case with RAID on Linux, but Linux isn’t specifically to blame. Since RAID began as an open specification that was quickly adopted and made proprietary by a multitude of value-added resellers and storage manufacturers, it fell victim to mismarketing. For example, arrays are often referred to as metadevices, logical volumes, or volume groups. All of these terms mean the same thing: a group of drives that behave as one—that is, a RAID or an array. In the following section, we will introduce various terms used to describe RAID.
RAID has the ability to survive disk failures and increase overall disk performance. The RAID levels described in the following section each provide a different combination of performance and reliability. The levels that yield the most impressive performance often sacrifice the ability to survive disk failures and vice versa.
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