Appendix B: Technology Background
75
RAID 5: Block and Parity Striping
RAID 5 is similar to RAID 3 as described above except that the parity data is
rotated across the physical drives along with the block data. Having the parity
data striped across all the physical drives in this manner removes the random
write performance bottleneck of RAID 3. The total capacity of a RAID 5 array is
calculated the same as a RAID 3 array.
4b
4c
4d
a parity
3a
3c
3d
b parity
2a
2b
2d
c parity
1a
1b
1c
d parity
Disk Drives
Distributed Parity
Data
Blocks
Figure 20. RAID 5 Stripes all Drives with Data and Parity Information