The most widespread standard for configuring multiplehard disk drives isRAID (redundant array of inexpensive/independent disks), which comes in a number ofstandard configurations andnon-standard configurations.Non-RAID drive architectures also exist, and are referred to by acronyms withtongue-in-cheek similarity to RAID:
JBOD (just a bunch of disks orjust a bunch of drives) is an architecture using multiple hard drives exposed as individual devices. Hard drives may be treated independently or may be combined into one or more logical volumes using a volume manager likeLVM ormdadm, or a device-spanning filesystem likebtrfs; such volumes are usually called "spanned" or "linear | SPAN | BIG".[2][3][4] A spanned volume provides no redundancy, so failure of a single hard drive amounts to failure of the whole logical volume.[5][6] Redundancy for resilience and/or bandwidth improvement may be provided, in software, at a higher level.
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Concatenation orspanning of drives is not one of the numbered RAID levels, but it is a popular method for combining multiple physical disk drives into a single logical disk. It provides no data redundancy. Drives are merelyconcatenated together, end to beginning, so they appear to be a single large disk, known asSPAN orBIG.[citation needed]
In the adjacent diagram, data are concatenated from the end of disk 0 (block A63) to the beginning of disk 1 (block A64); end of disk 1 (block A91) to the beginning of disk 2 (block A92). If RAID 0 were used, then disk 0 and disk 2 would be truncated to 28 blocks, the size of the smallest disk in the array (disk 1) for a total size of 84 blocks.[citation needed]
What makes a SPAN or BIG different from RAID configurations is the possibility for the selection of drives. While RAID usually requires all drives to be of similar capacity[a] and it is preferred that the same or similar drive models are used for performance reasons, a spanned volume does not have such requirements.[1][7]
The initial release of Microsoft'sWindows Home Server employsdrive extender technology, whereby an array of independent drives are combined by the OS to form a single pool of available storage. This storage is presented to the user as a single set of network shares. Drive extender technology expands on the normal features of concatenation by providing data redundancy through software – a shared folder can be marked for duplication, which signals to the OS that a copy of the data should be kept on multiple physical drives, whilst the user will only ever see a single instance of their data.[8] This feature was removed from Windows Home Server in its subsequent major release.[9]
Thebtrfs filesystem can span multiple devices of different sizes, including RAID 0/1/10 configurations, storing 1 to 4 redundant copies of both data and metadata.[10] (A flawed RAID 5/6 also exists, but can result in data loss.)[10] For RAID 1, the devices must have complementary sizes. For example, a filesystem spanning two 500 GB devices and one 1 TB device could provide RAID1 for all data, while a filesystem spanning a 1 TB device and a single 500 GB device could only provide RAID1 for 500 GB of data.
TheZFS filesystem can likewise pool multiple devices of different sizes and implement RAID, though it is less flexible, requiring the creation of virtual devices of fixed size on each device before pooling.[11]
In enterprise environments, enclosures are used to expand a server's data storage by using JBOD[12] devices. This is often a convenient way to scale-up storage when needed by daisy-chaining additional disk shelves.[13]
MAID (massive array of idle drives) is an architecture using hundreds to thousands of hard drives for providingnearline storage of data. MAID is designed for write once, read occasionally (WORO) applications.[14][15][16]
Compared to RAID technology, MAID has increased storage density, and decreased cost, electrical power, and cooling requirements. However, these advantages are at the cost of much increased latency, significantly lowerthroughput, and decreased redundancy. Drives designed for multiple spin-up/down cycles (e.g.laptop drives) are significantly more expensive.[17] Latency may be as high as tens of seconds.[18] MAID can supplement or replacetape libraries inhierarchical storage management.[15]
To allow a more gradual tradeoff between access time and power savings, some MAIDs such as Nexsan's AutoMAID incorporate drives capable of spinning down to a lower speed.[19] Large scale disk storage systems based on MAID architectures allow dense packaging of drives and are designed to have only 25% of disks spinning at any one time.[18]