Advise on RAID benefits
RAID offers a wealth of significant advantages that should be taking into account when purchasing new server.
Higher Data Security:
Through the use of redundancy, most RAID levels provide protection for the data stored on the array. This means that the data on the array can withstand even the complete failure of one hard disk (or sometimes more) without any data loss, and without requiring any data to be restored from backup. This security feature is a key benefit of RAID and probably the aspect that drives the creation of more RAID arrays than any other. All RAID levels provide some degree of data protection, depending on the exact implementation, except RAID level 0.
Fault Tolerance:
RAID implementations that include redundancy provide a much more reliable overall storage subsystem than can be achieved by a single disk.
This means that there is a lower chance of the storage subsystem as a whole failing due to hardware failures.
Improved Availability:
Availability refers to access to data. Good RAID systems improve availability both by providing fault tolerance and by providing special features that allow for recovery from hardware faults without disruption.
Increased, Integrated Capacity:
By turning a number of smaller drives into a larger array, we add their capacity together (although a percentage of total capacity is lost to overhead or redundancy in most implementations). This facilitates applications that require large amounts of contiguous disk space, and also makes disk space management simpler.
Improved Performance:
Last, but certainly not least, RAID systems improve performance by allowing the controller to exploit the capabilities of multiple hard disks to get around performance-limiting mechanical issues that plague individual hard disks. Different RAID implementations improve performance in different ways and to different degrees, but all improve it in some way.