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RAID stands for redundant array of independent disks. RAID contains the word array, and the two terms are often used interchangably. An array is a combination of two or more physical disks that are presented to the operating system as a single volume.
Disks are combined into different RAID configurations known as RAID levels. The RAID level you choose depends on which storage attributes are most important to you:
| Capacity | The total amount of data you can store. |
| Performance | The speed at which data is copied. |
| Protection | The number of disks that can fail before data is lost. |
Your LaCie 2big Dock can be configured as RAID 0, RAID 1, or JBOD. Each RAID level has its own advantages:
RAID 0—Data is not duplicated on both hard drives in RAID 0. This results in faster transfers and more storage, since the full capacity of both drives can be used to store unique data. However, RAID 0 lacks a very important feature: data protection. If a hard drive fails, all data in the array is lost.
RAID 1—RAID 1 provides greater safety since data is duplicated on each disk in the array. If a single disk fails, the data remains available on the other disk. However, this comes at a cost—since the same data is written to each drive, copying data takes longer and overall storage capacity is reduced by 50%. RAID 1 is a good choice when safety is more important than speed or disk space.
JBOD—”JBOD” stands for “Just a Bunch of Disks”, meaning that your two drives have not been configured as an array and operate as two independent disks.
To summarize, each RAID level has its own advantages:
| RAID level | Capacity | Protection | Speed | Factory default |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RAID 0 | 100% | None | Excellent | Yes |
| RAID 1 | 50% | Excellent | Good | No |
| JBOD | 100% | None | Varies | No |
To make changes to the RAID, see the Toolkit user manual for more details.