You may have heard that RAID is no longer applicable for enterprise storage: that it’s time had passed. RAID has dominated enterprise storage for decades and, while not a hot topic of conversation today, it remains a key strategic approach for businesses to consider.

To some degree, it is true, RAID is no longer the singular answer to enterprise storage that it once was.  For decades it was unchallenged as a technology and as an approach, and so reigned alone – a foregone conclusion in a giant sea of storage.  Today, RAIN has joined the space and is a viable alternative to RAID in many scenarios.  But just because RAIN is newer and the darling of storage conversations does not mean that RAIN will simply displace RAID nor that RAID’s position of importance has been eliminated.  Not at all.

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The post describes the history of RAID 5 and how it became obsolete at some point in time, just because HDD capacity grew at an enormous rate. It happened due to the chance of failure that grew to literal imminence when spinning disks reached TB scale, because the reading speed still had the same physical limits. Basically, creating a RAID 5 even with 1 TB disks would mean certain failure of the whole array and quite soon. The array technology was “saved” by an unlikely ally – the SSD. Being faster than hard disk drives in everything, they almost nullify the chance of the abovementioned failures. The post is written for everyday reader, not just engineers, and is quite comprehensive even without special knowledge and skills.

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