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Fierce competition dominates the market for professionally-equippedSerial ATA RAID controllers. Shortly after manufacturers HighPointand Promise became the first to launch their PCI-based products on the market, more well-known names like Adaptec and LSI Logicfollowed suit. A year ago, RAIDCore and NetCell also debuted their products, and made a good impression from theword go. All of these manufacturers concentrated primarily on making theirproducts better suited to the professional market, and are focusingparticularly on offering devices on the PCI-X interface. Now, Taiwanese manufacturer Areca hopes to go them one better bysupporting RAID 6. RAID controllers are used most often in business settings,particularly for servers. The point of RAID is to increase theperformance of the storage subsystem when using numerous harddrives simultaneously, and also protecting against data loss due tohard drive crashes. Even if regular backups are used, constantavailability of storage systems is invaluable for businessworkflows, and this is what RAID provides. A RAID Level 5 array is a common type, used in most normal businesssituations. In this arrangement, when data is written to the array,it is distributed to all drives but one. The controller generates achecksum (parity information) for the data set written, and writesthe checksum to the final hard drive. This can be used toreconstruct the data if any one drive is lost. At the same time,performance is improved because data is being written to (or readfrom) many drives in parallel. In RAID5, the drive chosen for the checksum changes for each datablock written. Thus, it is an enhancement of RAID3, where a singlededicated drive is used for all checksums. RAID5 improvesperformance because in RAID3 the dedicated parity drive can createa bottleneck. But there are also cases in which higher reliability is needed thancan be met by RAID 5. Areca addresses this by offering the optionof setting up a RAID 6 array. RAID 6 is like RAID 5 but uses twodrives for parity data, which means two drives can fail withoutdata loss. Naturally, this requires another hard drive to be put inthe array. We took a close look at how well this RAID levelfunctions, and how well it performs. The e-commerce company in China offers quality products such as Aluminum Cookware Set Manufacturer , Stainless Steel Whistling Kettle, and more. For more , please visit Stainless Steel Cookware Sets today!
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