What is RAID 7?
RAID 7 is technically not an official RAID level. However, some vendors use the term RAID 7 to describe their proprietary implementations of RAID. For example, on some older RAID controllers, RAID 7 was simply a single stand-alone hard drive configured on a RAID controller. Gateway/ALR Mylex controllers were the only controllers sold by Gateway that used this implementation. Other vendors use RAID 7 to describe the following implementation: RAID 7 has taken the concepts of RAID 3 and RAID 4 and has greatly enhanced them to address some limitations of those levels. RAID level 7 requires a great deal of cache as well as a real-time processor for managing an array asynchronously. This allows the array to handle many simultaneous operations, while maintaining fault tolerance. Specifically, RAID 7 offers much improved random read and write performance over RAID 3 or RAID 4, because the dependency on a parity disk is greatly reduced through the added hardware. The amount of cache that is nee