CertiGuide to Network+  9  Chapter 0110: Network Operating Systems (NOS)

Pop Quiz 0110.01 1 RAID 0

One hardware or software service that has proven to be important in server environments is the ability to provide redundancy for hard drives (disks), due to the importance of data stored on a network’s file servers. Redundancy increases reliability and hence, the uptime (or % of time the files are available by users) of the file server by compensating for the possibility that errors sometimes occur on computer disk drives (due to age or simple drive malfunction).

This service is known as RAID. It is available in software in NT, through the use of Disk Management (accessed through the Computer Management option in Windows 2000), and available in hardware on Intel systems running Microsoft Windows, Netware, Linux and most other computer systems (such as high end UNIX servers from IBM, Sun and HP) as well.

While not strictly a networking topic, it is an important network server feature that you should be familiar with.

RAID (Redundant Array of *Inexpensive* Disks) also sometimes referred to as *Independent* disks, is available in hardware or a software solution to guard against data loss.

There are several fault-tolerant RAID options open. The correct choice varies on the purpose of the server.

As with almost everything, the advantages of each RAID choice have its downside. In this course, you will briefly examine the three most popular RAID choices, RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 5:

Pop Quiz 0110.01 1 RAID 0