Sun Microsystems Fire 880, Owner'S Manual

Page: 173 / 236

Chapter 7 Server Administration 155
RAID 5: Disk Striping With Parity
RAID 5 is an implementation of disk striping in which parity information is
included with each disk write. The advantage of this technique is that if any one
disk in a RAID 5 array fails, all the information on the failed drive can be
reconstructed from the data and parity on the remaining disks.
System performance using RAID 5 will fall between that of RAID 0 and RAID 1;
however, RAID 5 provides limited data redundancy. If more than one disk fails, all
data is lost.
Hot Spares (Hot Relocation)
In a “hot spares” arrangement, one or more disk drives are installed in the system
but are unused during normal operation. Should one of the active drives fail, the
data on the failed disk is automatically reconstructed and generated on a hot spare
disk, enabling the entire data set to maintain its availability.
For More Information
See the documentation supplied with the VERITAS Volume Manager and Solstice
DiskSuite software.