Created on: May 24, 2013
Last updated: August 25, 2015
The Qx2's RAID levels are explained in detail below.
SPAN: The drives show up as one large single volume but the total size will depend on the drive with the smallest capacity. Spanning is an array (non-RAID) that is written sequentially to, across the hard drives. By itself, it does not provide any performance or redundancy benefits.
Striping(RAID 0): The drives show up as one large single volume but the total size will depend on the drive with the smallest capacity. Used where speed is the primary objective but RAID Level 0 (also called striping) is not redundant. This form of array splits each piece of
data across the drives in segments. Since data is written without parity data-checking, it allows for the fastest data transfer rates, but if one drive fails, the whole array can become corrupted.
Mirroring(RAID 1): The drives show up as one volume but only 50% of the total capacity can be used, depending on the drive with the smallest capacity. RAID 1 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on the second drive. This is useful when reliability and backup
are more important than capacity. When one drive fails, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt.
Disk Mirroring with Striping (RAID 10) (also known as RAID 1+0): The drives show up as one volume but only 50% of the total capacity can be used, depending on the drive with the smallest capacity. RAID 10 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data but also uses a RAID 0 Stripe for speed. When one hard drive fails, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt automatically.
Striping with Parity(RAID 5): The drives show up as one volume but the total capacity, depending on the drive with the smallest capacity, is the combined size minus the size of one drive. RAID 5 uses block level striping with parity data distributed across all member disks and therefore provides the perfect balance between high performance and data integrity. When one hard drive fails, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt automatically.
