What
is RAID 5?
RAID 5 is
the most common secure RAID level and uses data striping in a
technique designed to provide fault tolerant data storage. RAID
5 requires a minimum of three disks and a maximum of 16 disks.
Data is striped across all the disks in the array but for each
stripe through the array one strip unit is reserved to hold parity
data calculated from the other stripe units in the same strip.
The capacity
of a RAID 5 is to the smallest hard drive capacity multiplied
by the number of disks in the array minus one disk for parity.
RAID 5 has
been the standard in server environments requiring fault tolerance.
In a RAID
5 only 67% to 94% (depending on the number of disks) of the storage
capacity is usable. |
