RAID Systems

By: Mohamed Ishraque

 Mass Storage
• Many systems today need to store
many terabytes of data
• Don’t want to use single, large disk
– too expensive
– failures could be catastrophic
• Would prefer to use many smaller disks
 RAID
• Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks
• Basic idea is to connect multiple disks
together to provide
– large storage capacity
– faster access to reading data
– redundant data
• Many different levels of RAID systems
– differing levels of redundancy, error
checking, capacity, and cost
 Striping
• Take file data and map it to different
disks
• Allows for reading data in parallel
file data block 0 block 1 block 2 block 3

Disk 0 Disk 1 Disk 2 Disk 3

 Parity
• Way to do error checking and correction
• Add up all the bits that are 1
– if even number, set parity bit to 0
– if odd number, set parity bit to 1
• To actually implement this, do an exclusive
OR of all the bits being considered
• Consider the following 2 bytes
byte parity
10110011 1
01101010 0
• If a single bit is bad, it is possible to correct it
 Mirroring
• Keep to copies of data on two separate
disks
• Gives good error recovery
– if some data is lost, get it from the other
source
• Expensive
– requires twice as many disks
• Write performance can be slow
– have to write data to two different spots
• Read performance is enhanced
– can read data from file in parallel
 RAID Level-0
• Often called striping
• Break a file into blocks of data
• Stripe the blocks across disks in the
system
• Simple to implement
– disk = file block % number of disks
– sector = file block / number of disks
• provides no redundancy or error
detection
– important to consider because lots of disks
means low Mean Time To Failure (MTTF)
 RAID Level-0
file data block 0 block 1 block 2 block 3 block 4

0 block 0 0 block 1
1 block 2 1 block 3
sectors 2 block 4 2
sectors
3 3
4 4
5 5

Disk 0 Disk 1
 RAID Level-1
• A complete file is stored on a single disk
• A second disk contains an exact copy of the
file
• Provides complete redundancy of data
• Read performance can be improved
– file data can be read in parallel
• Write performance suffers
– must write the data out twice
• Most expensive RAID implementation
– requires twice as much storage space
 RAID Level-1
file data block 0 block 1 block 2 block 3 block 4

0 block 0 0 block 0
1 block 1 1 block 1
sectors 2 block 2 2 block 2
sectors
3 block 3 3 block 3
4 block 4 4 block 4
5 5

Disk 0 Disk 1
 RAID Level-2
• Stripes data across disks similar to
Level-0
– difference is data is bit interleaved instead
of block interleaved
• Uses ECC to monitor correctness of
information on disk
• Multiple disks record the ECC
information to determine which disk is
in fault
• A parity disk is then used to reconstruct
corrupted or lost data
 RAID Level-2
file data block 0 block 1 block 2 block 3 block 4

Data Disk Data Disk ECC Disk ECC Disk Parity Disk
 RAID Level-2
• Reconstructing data
– assume data striped across eight disks
– correct data: 10011010
– parity: 0
– data read: 10011110
– if we can determine that disk 2 is in error
– just use read data and parity to know which
bit to flip
 RAID Level-2
• Requires fewer disks than Level-1 to provide
redundancy
• Still needs quite a few more disks
– for 10 data disks need 4 check disks plus parity
disk
• Big problem is performance
– must read data plus ECC code from other disks
– for a write, have to modify data, ECC, and parity
disks
• Another big problem is only one read at a
time
– while a read of a single block can be done in
parallel
 RAID Level-3
• One big problem with Level-2 are the
disks needed to detect which disk had
an error
• Modern disks can already determine if
there is an error
– using ECC codes with each sector
• So just need to include a parity disk
– if a sector is bad, the disk itself tells us, and
use the parity disk to correct it
 RAID Level-4
• Big problem with Level-2 and Level-3 is
the bit interleavening
– to access a single file block of data, must
access all the disks
– allows good parallelism for a single access
but doesn’t allow multiple I/O’s
• Level-4 interleaves file blocks
– allows multiple small I/O’s to be done at
once
 RAID Level-4
• Still use a single disk for parity
• Now the parity is calculated over data
from multiple blocks
– Level-2,3 calculate it over a single block
• If an error detected, need to read other
blocks on other disks to reconstruct
data
 Level-4 vs. Level-2,3
0 1 2 3
a

b 4 different disks
Transfer Units
c

a0 b0 c0 d0 a1 b1 c1 d1 a2 b2 c2 d2 a3 b3 c3 d3
L3
a b c d
L3 Parity

a0 a1 a2 a3 b0 b1 b2 b3 c0 c1 c2 c3 d0 d1 d2 d3
L4

0 1 2 3
L4 Parity
 RAID Level-4
• Reads are simple to understand
– want to read block A, read it from disk 0
– if there is an error, read in blocks B,C, D,
and parity block and calculate correct data
• What about writes?
– it looks like a write still requires access to
4 data disks to recalculate the parity data
– not true, can use the following formula
• new parity = (old data xor new data) xor old
parity
– a write requires 2 reads and 2 writes
 RAID Level-4
• Doing multiple small reads is now
faster than before
• However, writes are still very slow
– this is because of calculating and writing
the parity blocks
• Also, only one write is allowed at a time
– all writes must access the check disk so
other writes have to wait
 RAID Level-5
• Level-5 stripes file data and check data
over all the disks
– no longer a single check disk
– no more write bottleneck
• Drastically improves the performance of
multiple writes
– they can now be done in parallel
• Slightly improves reads
– one more disk to use for reading
 RAID Level-5
Level-4 Level-5
check
data disks disk data and check disks

1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5

S0 S0

S1 S1

S2 S2

S3 S3

S4 S4

S5 S5
 RAID Level-5
• Notice that for Level-4 a write to sector 0 on
disk 2 and sector 1 on disk 3 both require a
write to disk five for check information
• In Level-5, a write to sector 0 on disk 2 and
sector 1 on disk 3 require writes to different
disks for check information (disks 5 and 4,
respectively)
• Best of all worlds
– read and write performance close to that of RAID
Level-1
– requires as much disk space as Levels-3,4
 RAID Level-10
• Combine Level-0 and Level-1
• Stripe a files data across multiple disks
– gives great read/write performance
• Mirror each strip onto a second disk
– gives the best redundancy
• The most high performance system
• The most expensive system