AMCC 9590SE, 9550SX, 9500S, 9650SE manual RAID 5 Configuration Example

Chapter 1. Introduction to the 3ware Command Line Interface

Figure 3. RAID 5 Configuration Example

RAID 6

RAID 6 requires a 3ware 9650SE RAID controller.

RAID 6 provides greater redundancy and fault tolerance than RAID 5. It is similar to RAID 5, but has two blocks of parity information (P+Q) distributed across all the drives of a unit, instead of the single block of RAID 5.

Due to the two parities, a RAID 6 unit can tolerate two hard drives failing simultaneously. This also means that a RAID 6 unit may be in two different states at the same time. For example, one sub-unit can be degraded, while another may be rebuilding, or one sub-unit may be initializing, while another is verifying.

RAID 6 requires a minimum of five drives. Performance and storage efficiency also increase as the number of drives increase.

12 3ware Serial ATA RAID Controller CLI Guide