Raid stands for redundant array of independent disks. Maybe you have heard this term for the first time, but a raid controller is a hardware device or a program that is used to manage the hard disk drives (HDD) or Solid-State Drives (SSDs). This ensures that hard disks work as a logical unit.
A RAID controller is going to provide a level of protection to the stored data. It will also help in improving computing performance which is done by accelerating access to stored data.
What is The Use of RAID Controller?
The controller offers a level of interaction between the operating system and the physical drives. RAID can be a hardware or software both. RAID application presents sections of the drives to the operating systems and applications as a logical unit.
For them, data protection schemes can be defined. The logical units might appear as the portions of drives to the operating system and the applications, even though they comprise of many drives. The controller has the ability to improve the performance and protect the data in any event of a crash because it has the ability to access multiple copies of the data on various physical devices.
There are various RAID configurations up to ten as well as numerous proprietary variations of the standard set of RAID levels. The RAID controller will be supporting a specific RAID level or a group of various related levels.
Hardware and software RAID Controllers:
The physical controller is able to manage the RAID array in the hardware-based RAID. the controller can easily take the form of PCI or PCI Express card. This card is designed to support a specific drive format such as SCSI or SATA. there are some RAID controllers that can also be integrated with the motherboard. The RAID controllers which are hardware are also known as RAID Adapters.
The Prices of hardware RAID controllers are very affordable. The sophisticated hardware RAID controllers can perform well enough such as Adaptec ASR-72405. They can perform good enough to share network storage and helps in the procurement of significant stored data.
There are various companies right now which are offering RAID Controllers at this time. There are some key features that are going to help you decide when you are out to choose a Hardware RAID controller.
- SATA and/or SAS interface
- Power consumption
- Read/write performance
- PCIe interface
- Operating system compatibility
- Number of devices supported
- Read/write performance
- IOPs rating
- Cache size
- Encryption capabilities
Well, A Raid controller can also be a software-only by using the hardware resources of the host system, most particularly the host’s DRAM and CPU. There is not much difference between the Software based RAID controllers and the Hardware based ones, but the performance is typically less than the hardware version of the controllers.
One of the main advantages of using a software RAID controller is its flexibility and low cost as there is no hardware required. It is very important to make sure that the host system is powerful enough to run the RAID software without having any negative effect on the performance of the on-going applications that are running on the host.
There is various RAID controller software for example windows server is providing various RAID capabilities with its storage spaces facility. LINUX is also providing the RAID facility which is via Linux madam utility.
There is many third-party RAID controller software available in the market. These programs are enough for small installations but will not be able to stand up to the storage performance and the capacity and the requirements of the capacity of various business environments.
So, there are various storage arrays that are employing various software RAID controllers. The software is typically designed by the vendors and only proves to provide adequate performance. But the performance cannot match the performance of Hardware RAID controllers like Adaptec ASR-6805E.
Conclusion:
Before you are going to choose the RAID controller, make sure you are deciding on whether how big the data is and what type of data you want to store.
