8MediaShield User’s Guide – Version 4.0
CHAPTER 1
About NVIDIA® MediaShield™
RAID 5How RAID 5 Works
RAID 5 stripes both data and parity information across three or more drives. It writes data
and parity blocks across all the drives in the array. Fault tolerance is maintained by
ensuring that the parity information for any given block of data is placed on a different
drive from those used to store the data itself.
Figure 1.4
RAID 5 Array Diagram
Summary of Features and Benefits
•Benefits: An ideal combination of good performance, good fault tolerance, and high
capacity and storage efficiency.
•Drawbacks: Individual block data transfer rate same as a single disk. Write
performance can be CPU intensive.
•Uses: RAID 5 is recommended for transaction processing and general purpose service.
•Drives: Minimum, 3
•Fault Tolerance: Yes