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A RAID 5 array contains three or more hard drives where the data is divided into manageable blocks called strips. Parity is a mathematical method for recreating data that was lost from a single drive, which increases fault-tolerance. The data and parity are striped across all the hard drives in the array. The parity is striped in a rotating sequence to reduce bottlenecks associated with the parity calculations.
The capacity of a RAID 5 array is the size of the smallest drive multiplied by one less than the number of drives in the array. The equivalent of only a single hard drive is used to store the parity information, allowing for fault-tolerance with less than the 50% capacity reduction of RAID 1. For example, three 400 GB hard drives in a RAID 5 array will appear as a single 800 GB hard drive to the operating system.
The primary benefits of RAID 5 include capacity and data protection. Because parity is used for data protection, up to 75% of the total drive capacity is usable. Further, any single drive can fail and it is possible to rebuild the data after replacing the failed hard drive with a new drive. However, the extra work of calculating the missing data will degrade the write performance to the RAID 5 volume while the volume is being rebuilt.
The read performance of a RAID 5 array is greater than that of a single drive because data can be read from multiple disks simultaneously. Disk writes do not realize the same benefit because parity must be calculated and written to all the drives.
To enhance the write performance of RAID 5, Intel® Matrix Storage Manager software has implemented a RAID 5 volume write-back cache and coalescer.
The volume write-back cache allows writes to be buffered and improves coalescing. The cache is disabled by default, but can be enabled by the user through the Intel® Matrix Storage Console. An Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) is recommended for use if the cache is enabled.
The coalescer allows write requests to be combined into larger requests to reduce the number of I/Os per write for parity calculations. The coalescer is enabled by default, and the user does not have the option to disable it.
| Minimum Disks |
| Advantage |
Higher percentage of usable capacity and high read performance as well as fault-tolerance. |
| Fault-tolerance |
Excellent - parity information allows data to be rebuilt after replacing a failed hard drive with a new drive. |
| Application |
Storage of large amounts of critical data. | |
This applies to:
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