Week 2: Muddy

           This week I found the concept of RAID the most difficult to understand. In the lesson on storage with computer systems, I learned about RAID0 and RAID1. RAID0 excels with speed and capacty and allows two or more disks to apear like a single disk. This allows for either increased capacity and speed or more reliability. RAID0 allows for double the capacity because it uses more than one hard drive. The danger with RAID0 is that single disk failure causes the loss of all data since it is evenly distributed aross the disk drives. On the other hand, RAID1 is always done with two disk drives, and everything written on one disk drive is written on the other disk drive to create "mirror images." This can be expensive, but it produces higher reliability. Overall, if you want a system that is always available and uptime is also a concern, then RAID1 is ideal because it protects against single drive failure.
          This concept doesn't make sense to me because I don't see a clear distinction between RAID0 and RAID1. I don't understand how RAID0 appears like a single disk and can allow either increased speed and capacity or increase reliability. How can these be separate concepts?

                 I had difficulty understanding this concept primarily because I could not visualize the difference between RAID0 and RAID1. At this website I was able to fnd a better explanation of the differences between RAID0 and RAID1. It broke down the advantages and disadvantages, making the concept easier to understand. I think what helped me the most was the picture on this website which showed me what was meant by striping and mirroring. At the bottom of this post is a separate picture that also helped me visualize RAID0 and RAID1.