Disk arrays were proposed in the 1980s as a way to use parallelism between multiple disks to improve aggregate I/O performance. Today they appear in the product lines of most major computer manufacturers. This paper gives a comprehensive overview of disk arrays and provides a framework in which to organize current and future work. The paper first introduces disk technology and reviews the driving force s that have popularized disk arrays: performance and reliability. It then discusses the two architectural techniques used in disk arrays: striping across multiple disks to improve performance and redundancy to improve reliability. Next, the paper describes seven disk array architectures, called RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) levels 0-6 and compares their performance, cost, and reliability. It goes on to discuss advanced research and implementation topics such a s refining the basic RAID levels to improve performance and designing algorithms to maintain data consistency. Last, the paper describes five disk array prototypes or products and discusses future opportunities for research. The paper includes an annotated bibliography of disk array-related literature.
Cited By
Leventhal A (2010). Triple-parity RAID and beyond, Communications of the ACM, 53:1, (58-63), Online publication date: 1-Jan-2010.- Leventhal A (2009). Triple-Parity RAID and Beyond, Queue, 7:11, (30-39), Online publication date: 1-Dec-2009.
- Cohen A and Cohen R (2002). A Dynamic Approach for Efficient TCP Buffer Allocation, IEEE Transactions on Computers, 51:3, (303-312), Online publication date: 1-Mar-2002.
- Park C and Choe T Striping in disk array RM2 enabling the tolerance of double disk failures Proceedings of the 1996 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing, (46-es)
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