[ The PC Guide | Systems and Components Reference Guide | Hard Disk Drives | Hard Disk Performance, Quality and Reliability | Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) | RAID Configuration and Implementation ]

Advanced RAID Features

There are several important features that have been developed over the last few years to improve the capabilities of RAID-equipped systems. They are usually found on high-end systems that use more expensive RAID controllers. In addition to a capable controller, these features may also require other hardware in the system to be designed to support them. For example, the system case or RAID enclosure must be designed to support drive swapping for that feature to work.

In this section I take a look at caching (including write caching), hot drive spares and drive swapping, three key features that improve performance and availability in RAID arrays. Finally, I discuss the important issue of RAID array expansion, and how to plan for the future of your RAID array.

Next: Caching

Home  -  Search  -  Topics  -  Up