Terms Explained

Need help understanding some of the technical terms used on our site?

Below is a link to different pages simplifieng the terms commonly used in the computer industry and on our web site.

Information on RAID Levels

  • RAID 0 is the fastest and most efficient array type but offers no fault-tolerance.
  • RAID 1 is the array of choice for performance-critical, fault-tolerant environments. In addition, RAID-1 is the only choice for fault-tolerance if no more than two drives are desired.
  • RAID 2 is seldom used today since ECC is embedded in almost all modern disk drives.
  • RAID 3 can be used in data intensive or single-user environments which access long sequential records to speed up data transfer. However, RAID-3 does not allow multiple I/O operations to be overlapped and requires synchronized-spindle drives in order to avoid performance degradation with short records.
  • RAID 4 offers no advantages over RAID-5 and does not support multiple simultaneous write operations.
  • RAID 5 is the best choice in multi-user environments which are not write performance sensitive. However, at least three, and more typically five drives are required for RAID-5 arrays.
  • RAID 6 is similar to RAID level 5 however it allows extra fault tolerance by using a second indipendent parity scheme.
  • RAID 10 is implemented as a striped array whose segments are RAID 1 arrays.
  • RAID 0+1 is a mirrored array whose drives are in a RAID 5 array.

Information About Storage Including NAS, DAS and SAN

  • NAS (Network Attached Storage) is when a large amount of storage is added to a network and is not directly connected to any user on the network.
  • DAS (Direct Attached Storage) is when extra storage is connected to a user on the neteork.
  • SAN Is similar to NAS however the data is saved in block format instead of file.

Information About Hard Drives And Technolgies

Information About Processors

Information About RAM/Memory


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