ABSTRACT
The astounding volume of data being transmitted between systems today has created an obvious need for data management. As a result, more servers have assumed the role of information providers and managers. The common solution to providing access to many gigabytes of data to users fast and reliably has been to assemble a number of drives together in a gang or array of disks, known as redundant arrays of independent disks (RAID) subsystems. Despite its multidrive configuration, the individual disk drives of a RAID subsystem remain hidden from users; the subsystem itself is the virtual drive, though it can be infinitely large. The phantom virtual drive is created at a lower level within the host operating system through the RAID management software. The read performance gain can be realized if the redundant data is distributed evenly on all of the drives of a mirrored set within the subsystem.
