What is RAID-K?

Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks (RAID) is a storage system that combines two or more disk drives for fault tolerance and (sometimes) increased performance. RAID storage systems are frequently used on servers, especially for enterprise applications. RAID-K is a type of RAID that is proprietary to Kaleidescape. 

RAID-K is similar to RAID 4, in that a dedicated parity drive stores the parity information that enables fault tolerance. Unlike RAID 4, however, it does not use block-level striping of file data — it attempts to keep each movie or music album wholly contained on a single disk. 

RAID-K, like RAID 4, enables the storage capacity of the array to be increased one disk drive at a time. Unlike RAID 4, however, RAID-K permits redundant parity information to exist on more than one disk in order to accommodate a mixture of different sizes of disks. Therefore, Kaleidescape users can incrementally add storage capacity, even with larger disks.

Furthermore, with RAID-K there is more than just parity data in the redundant information used to achieve fault tolerance. 

These features provide better performance for movies and music, and increased safety for the storage of such data.

RAID-K is only available on Premiere systems.