A systems administrator is configuring a new server that will host the company's primary authentication service. The service requires high availability, and the primary concern for the operating system volume is resilience against a single drive failure to ensure continuous operation. Storage capacity and write performance are secondary concerns for this volume. Which of the following RAID configurations should the administrator implement for the two dedicated OS drives?
The correct answer is RAID 1. RAID 1, or mirroring, writes identical data to two or more disks simultaneously. This configuration provides high availability and fault tolerance because if one drive fails, the system can continue to operate without interruption using the other drive. This directly meets the scenario's primary requirement for resilience against a single drive failure. RAID 0 (striping) offers improved performance but no fault tolerance; if one drive fails, the entire array is lost. RAID 5 (striping with parity) provides fault tolerance but requires a minimum of three drives, which is not an option in this scenario. JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) combines disks into a single logical volume but offers no redundancy or fault tolerance.