10. Storage

Hybrid Drives

A storage device that combines fast flash memory cache with a slower spinning hard disk to give you higher speeds than a normal hard drive at a lower cost.

Solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD)

A hybrid drive that is seen and handled by the operating system as one single physical drive.

Dual-drive storage solution

A setup where an SSD and an HDD are installed together and seen by the operating system as two completely separate drives.

RAID Structure

A method of combining multiple physical hard drives into a single unit to boost data speed, provide backups, or both.

RAID level 0 (Disk Striping)

Splitting and writing data across two or more drives at once to make data access super fast, but if even one drive fails, all data is completely lost.

RAID level 1 (Disk Mirroring)

Writing exact copies of the same data to two drives at the exact same time to create an automatic backup, though it makes writing data slower.

RAID level 4

A storage setup that uses dedicated error-correcting-code (ECC) on a separate drive to find and fix data mistakes.

RAID level 5 (Block-interleaved distributed parity)

Splitting both data and backup check-data (parity) evenly across all available drives, allowing the system to completely rebuild your data if one single drive breaks.

RAID level 6

A heavy-duty configuration similar to RAID 5 that saves two separate sets of parity data so the system can survive up to two simultaneous drive failures.

RAID level 10 (1+0)

A high-performance combination where hard drives are mirrored into pairs for safety first, and then those mirrored pairs are striped together for pure speed.

RAID level 0+1

A combination setup where hard drives are striped for speed first, and then those resulting striped collections are mirrored for backup.