Someone explain RAID 5

[stuman19]

Can someone explain RAID 5 in their own words? Some websites are good, however some seem a hard to read and understand. Anyone with a nice smooth explanation? I just implemented RAID 5 on a few servers and I need to have technical documentation. Thanks for any imput.

Stu

 

[ai42]

RAID 5, is the perfect mix between RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring). Baiscally it requires at least 3 drives, and allows for the faster access of RAID 0, while keeping parity bits still and have the backup the data nessecary if 1 drive were to fail.

 

[Vegito]

basically its this
Drive 1 = A
Drive 2 = B
Drive 3 = C

A+B=C

if A is dead, then C-B = A
if B is dead, then C-A = B

you can have 6 drive raid 5, so if and only if 1 drive dies, you can still recover. Third drive is used to store parity, but parity is spread out between each drive also.

You just need to keep spare drive of each raid size , unless they're all the same size.

 

[snidy1]

Should all of the drives be the same size? Or should the third drive be twice the size?

 

[Biggs]

RAID FAQ