Chapter 7: Technology Background

RAID 5 – Block and Parity Stripe

RAID 5 organizes block data and parity data across the physical drives. Generally, RAID Level 5 tends to exhibit lower random write performance due to the heavy workload of parity recalculation for each I/O. RAID 5 is generally considered to be the most versatile RAID level

Distributed Parity

Data

Blocks

Disk Drives

Figure 3. RAID 5 Stripes all drives with data and parity information

The capacity of a RAID 5 disk array is the smallest drive size multiplied by the number of drives less one. Hence, a RAID 5 disk array with (4) 100 GB hard drives will have a capacity of 300GB. A disk array with (8) 120GB hard drives and

(1)100GB hard drive will have a capacity of 800GB. RAID 5 arrays consist of three or more physical drives.

Recommended applications: File and Application Servers; WWW, E-mail, News servers, Intranet Servers

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Promise Technology M200f, M500i RAID 5 Block and Parity Stripe, RAID 5 Stripes all drives with data and parity information