Instructor: In this lesson, we are going to talk
about RAID configurations,
and you're going to see them come up
in your multiple choice, as well as in your simulations.
So let me jump in and show you hands-on how we configure
these different RAIDs in my system.
All right, so here we are inside the simulated BIOS
that I have for a system,
and this system has four drives that I've installed.
You can see them down towards the bottom there,
SATA-one, SATA-two, SATA-four, and SATA-six.
They're all 808 gigabytes,
and they're Western Digital hard drives
of 800 gigabytes each.
Now, what I want to be able to do is I want to go
through my BIOS, and I want to turn on the RAID,
and then I'm going to boot into the RAID environment.
So if you go here, this is actually a UEFI BIOS,
so I can actually go through and use my mouse,
and under system configuration, you'll find SATA operation.
Now under here, we're going to turn the RAID on,
and that will allow us to reboot into the RAID controller.
Now, the other thing I can look at here is my drives,
and you can see here that I do have four drives,
and all of them are enabled in the BIOS
so they will report back to the RAID array.
And then I also have my SMART reporting,
which would be able to tell me
whether or not the hard drives are failing at some point,
and so I'm going to go ahead and enable that as well,
because that's a good thing to have in your system.
SMART is the self monitoring analysis
and reporting technology specification, and it will tell you
when the hard drive starts having errors
and is eventually going to fail.
So once I've done all that, I'm going to go ahead
and hit apply, and I'm going to go ahead and hit exit,
and as it's rebooting, we'll hit control-I to enter
into the RAID controller's firmware.
This is actually being controlled
by a hardware RAID controller.
You can also create your RAID as a software RAID
inside of Windows, but you'll really get into that detail
when you get into part two of A+.
So here we are inside the RAID controller,
and we're going to be able to make
our configuration changes here.
Now again, this will be different depending
on which hardware you're using,
just like your BIOS may have looked differently
than my BIOS or my UEFI, but it is going to give you the idea
of the types of steps you're going to have to do.
If you were given a question like this on the exam,
they might start you out inside this screen already.
Now, from here, what do we want to do?
We want to create a RAID, and so we're going to do that using
those four drives that you see at the bottom.
So I'm here, I have number one highlighted,
and as you can see, it says enter to select the menu,
so I'm going to hit enter,
and from here, I can give it a name.
Now, on the exam, they're going to tell you
what they want you to do, at least in a very generic way,
so they may say something
like a small business owner has hired you
to configure a RAID.
They want to have a RAID that gives them redundancy
with parity, and will use the least amount of drives.
The name of the RAID array should be Dion Training, okay?
So I know my name should be Dion Training,
so I'll go ahead and type that in,
and then we're going to go down,
and we'll just hit tab to go to the next spot.
Now, to change that, I'm just going to arrow up or down,
and this actually told me that
inside the bottom left corner of this window.
So here I have a RAID zero.
If I hit down, I have a RAID one, which is a mirror.
If I go down, I have RAID five, which is parity.
If I go down, I have a RAID one zero,
or a RAID zero plus one.
Now, the nice thing about this system is
it actually is telling me which type it is,
and actually gives you some information at the bottom,
for instance, strips data gives you performance,
mirror data gives you redundancy, strips data
and parity gives you both data and parity,
and a RAID one zero is going to mirror your data
and strips the mirror.
Now on the exam, they're not going to be that nice.
It's simply going to say RAID zero, RAID one, RAID five,
RAID 10, because they want to make sure you know the answers.
And so if I told you, you needed redundancy with parity,
which one are we going to select?
Well, that'll be a RAID five,
because that one has redundancy and parity.
Now I'm going to hit enter,
and that brings me the next thing, which is the disks.
I need to select the disks.
It tells me hit enter to select the physical disks,
so I'll hit enter, and here I go.
Now, again going back to the scenario I gave you,
you're creating a Dion Training RAID drive
that has redundancy and parity
using the least amount of disks.
This is testing you on whether or not you know
what is the least amount of disks for a RAID five.
So that's why this is harder than just the multiple choice,
because you had to pick the right type of RAID,
and now you have to pick the right number of drives.
And if you missed one or the other,
that can actually screw up the entire simulation,
because if you thought the way
to get best redundancy was to use RAID one,
but you missed that parity piece,
and now you're selecting two drives,
that would be correct for RAID one,
but not correct for a RAID five,
and so you're going to not get any partial credit in that case.
So in our case, we are doing a RAID five,
so the minimum disk number would be three.
So we're going to go through here and hit space
to select the first one, space to hit the second one,
and space to hit the third one,
and then we'll hit enter to be done.
Then we want to go ahead and hit tab to go to the next spot,
which gives us the strip size, and they can give us,
a strip size might be specified in the question.
If it isn't, you can just leave the default.
In this case,
they're saying the default normally would be 64K.
It already says 128, 128 is fine for me.
If they don't tell you what to use,
just leave what's already there.
Next, you have your capacity.
How much space do you want to use in this RAID?
Now, this goes back to our question earlier
that we talked about as we started talking
through the different RAIDs.
I used three disks of 808 gigabytes each.
Now, that's 2,400 gigabytes of total space,
but because I'm using a RAID five,
one third of that is being used for parity.
That brings me down to 1616 and a half,
which is what's being shown right here.
You don't need to change this, unless you want to use
less space for the RAID so that way you can use more
of that disk for other things later on.
In the case of the scenario, they didn't specify,
so guess what?
We're going to leave the defaults,
and then we're going to go ahead and create the volume.
We'll press enter to create the specified volume.
We'll say yes, we want to create this volume,
and there we go.
Now you can see in the middle of my screen
it says RAID volume ID zero, the name of it, Dion Training,
the level, RAID five parity, strip of 128 kilobits,
size 1.5 terabytes, which is 1606 gigabytes.
Status is normal, and it's bootable.
This drive is now good, and we are done.
If the simulation just told you to create the RAID,
you created it.
At this point, you're done.
You'd hit the done button,
and you would go off to your next question.
All right, so at this point, let's go ahead
and answer a couple other questions using our RAIDs here.
Let's go ahead and delete our RAID.
And we're going to go ahead and delete this,
so we're going to do that
by hitting the delete key, and saying yes.
And so now we are back at the main screen, new problem.
So the last one I gave you, we wanted you to create a RAID
for Dion Training, and we were most concerned
with the fact that they had redundancy with parity.
This time Dion Training is telling you
that they're a video editing company.
They're building a new video editing workstation,
and they need a RAID that can give them
increased speed and performance.
They have no concern for redundancy.
They want you to use the least amount of disks possible,
and give them the most amount of space.
Which RAID should you create?
Go ahead and do it.
All right, so now how are we going to do that?
Well, we're going to go back and create our RAID.
We're going to give it a name.
We're going to call it Dion Training again,
and we're going to go ahead and hit tab,
and we're going to choose our RAID level.
Do we want a RAID zero striping?
Do we want RAID one mirroring?
Do we want RAID five parity?
Do we want RAID one zero,
which gives us striping and mirroring?
Well, what was the question?
We said this was for a video editing workstation.
We wanted speed as our primary factor.
Anytime you hear speed, you should be thinking RAID zero,
so we're going to select RAID zero.
Because they have no care for redundancy,
and all they want is speed, RAID zero is the answer.
Next, we need to select our disks,
so we'll go in there and hit enter.
We'll select the first two disks we need,
because we only need two disks,
because they said they only wanted two disks,
and they wanted to use all the space on those disks.
So we'll hit enter, and then we'll go hit tab, go next.
We're going to leave the default,
'cause they didn't tell us anything.
We'll go to capacity,
and they said they wanted the maximum space,
so we'll leave all 1616 gigabytes there,
and then we are going to go ahead and create our volume.
Hit yes, and we can verify here we do have RAID ID zero.
The name is Dion Training.
The level is RAID zero, which is a striped array.
That's going to give us a lot of speed.
We see it as 1.5 terabytes.
It is normal status, and it is bootable,
good, check, click the done button,
move on to the next question.
All right, I'm going to give you two more.
We'll go ahead and delete our RAID volume again.
We are going to go ahead and delete that, hit yes.
All right, this time I want you to create a RAID volume,
and this one I want you to create is going to be
fully mirrored, because it has
all of my financial data on it.
So in this case, we're going to call it Financials,
and we're going to go ahead and select which RAID we want.
If I want it fully mirrored,
did I say anything about speed?
No, I just said mirrored, and I was worried
about redundancy, because it has my financial data,
so we're going to choose RAID?
That's right, RAID one.
So we're going to go ahead and select RAID one,
and we're going to do that simply by hitting the down button.
We'll then hit tab.
We'll select our disk.
How many disks do I need for RAID one?
Again, they said minimum number of disks,
so we're going to go ahead and select the first two disks only.
And we're going to go ahead and look at our capacity.
What do we have for capacity?
808, why do I have 808, when I just put two disks in there
that was 808 each?
Well, if you remember from the lesson,
RAID one uses half of that space as redundancy,
because both disks are going to mirror
the exact same amount of data, and so because of that,
we can go ahead and hit tab, hit create volume, hit yes.
Now we're going to look at it.
We have a RAID with ID zero.
We have a name, Financials.
The type of rate is RAID one, and we have the size
of 808 gigabytes, status normal, and bootable.
Check, we've met all the requirements.
Go ahead and hit the done button.
All right, last one, let me go ahead and delete this,
and what we're going to do for this last one,
you probably can guess it
because we haven't done it yet, is a RAID
that's going to give us both speed and mirroring,
because we want full redundancy.
Now, which of those should I use?
Well, I said I want it to be fully redundant,
to be having a mirror, and that I'm concerned with speed.
Those three keywords should tell you what you need.
If it was speed, it'd be RAID zero.
If it was full redundancy and mirroring, it'd be RAID one.
But if I want both,
I need to put them together and get a RAID one zero.
So we're going to go ahead and create our RAID.
So we're going to go ahead and delete the name.
We're going to call it Dion Training.
We're going to go ahead and hit the enter key,
and from here, we're going to select down
until we get to RAID one zero.
Now when we select our disks, how many disks do we need?
We need four.
Notice it didn't let me select the disks, why?
Because it already knows I only have four disks
on this system, and it's going to have to use
at least four disks.
All the other times, it let me choose which disks to use,
because there was four hard disks, and I only needed two
or three, depending on the RAID I was using.
Now again, I'm going to leave the default for the strip size,
and when I look at the capacity, I have 1616 gigabytes.
I can go ahead and hit create,
and we'll go ahead and create that volume,
and now you can see
that I have four disks all listed at the bottom.
They're all members of the disk zero, which is
under RAID volumes ID zero of the name Dion Training.
You'll notice here under level and strip,
both of those aren't being shown.
That's just an error in the way
this controller is displaying the RAID one zero information,
but you do see it is 1.5 terabytes, it's normal status,
and it is bootable.
Sometimes on the exam, you may see things like this,
where it doesn't quite look right,
because it didn't go through
and show you what you're expecting.
In this case, we verified that those member disks,
all four of them are part of Dion Training RAID ID zero,
and so we know what we did.
We know we did it correct.
We can go ahead and get done and move on.
If you are really concerned about it, you could go back
and say, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and reset
the simulation, which in my case requires me to delete it,
and then I'm going to go ahead and try it one more time.
In this case, we'll call it Dion Training.
We'll go down.
We'll put at rate one zero.
Again, we can't select our disks.
We have our strip size.
We have our volume size.
That all looks good.
We'll create our volume, we'll say yes,
and we got the exact same results,
which tells me this is probably a simulation error
inside this controller that we're seeing,
or something like that.
So again, you're up against the clock on the exam.
You can't sit here and just play with it for hours,
so I would go ahead and hit done,
move on to the next question.
So hopefully this was helpful as I went through each
of the four RAID types, what they're used for,
and how to select them
based on the question you're given.
On the exam, if you get a RAID question,
I'm confident that you're ready for it.