No matter how carefully a manufacturer screens hard drives and no matter how much they are tested before shipping, inevitably some drives will fail in the field. So, it’s important that any storage solution have a way to protect your data in the event of a drive failure.
All EditShare systems are built around the world’s most trusted and best performing hardware-accelerated RAID-5 cards. In brief, RAID-5 is an enhanced form of RAID-0 (often called “striping”) which spreads out data across many drives to give you the combined speed of the whole group. With RAID-5, you sacrifice ONE drive’s worth of storage per “striped set” to get redundancy. Every time you write data to your RAID set, the RAID-5 hardware makes a “parity calculation” and saves it to a special sector on one of the drives. Should ANY one of your drives fail, the missing data can be regenerated from the data that remains. Even with one drive missing, you can still operate at about 90 percent of full speed – both writing and reading. And as soon as you replace the failed drive, the system will automatically and quickly rebuild the RAID set to give you protection again.
Don’t ever let anybody tell you that RAID-5 systems are slow. A 16-drive EditShare system is capable of writing data at over 450 MB/sec, and can read data at over 750 MB/sec.
If you are comparing EditShare to other solutions, look carefully at the fine print. Some solutions only offer RAID-0 (striping) which doesn’t give you any protection at all. While other solutions only offer “mirroring” for protection – which literally duplicates the same data on two sets of drives. When you turn on mirroring, you lose HALF of your effective storage. So, for example, if you have an 8TB system that uses mirroring, you will only get 4 TB of “protected storage”. In contrast, when you purchase an 8 TB EditShare system, you will get 7.5 TB of “protected storage”.