Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide

Classes of Volumes

You create a volume as a RAID-0 (concatenation or stripe) volume, a RAID-1 (mirror) volume, a RAID-5 volume, or a soft partition.

You can use either the Enhanced Storage tool within the Solaris Management Console or the command-line utilities to create and administer volumes.

The following table summarizes the classes of volumes.

Table 3–2 Classes of Volumes

Volume 

Description 

RAID-0 (stripe or concatenation)

Can be used directly, or as the basic building block for mirrors. RAID-0 volumes do not directly provide data redundancy.  

RAID-1 (mirror)

Replicates data by maintaining multiple copies. A RAID-1 volume is composed of one or more RAID-0 volumes that are called submirrors. 

RAID-5

Replicates data by using parity information. In the case of disk failure, the missing data can be regenerated by using available data and the parity information. A RAID-5 volume is generally composed of slices. One slice's worth of space is allocated to parity information, but the parity is distributed across all slices in the RAID-5 volume. 

Soft partition 

Divides a slice or logical volume into one or more smaller, extensible volumes.