In Figure A, with four disks used in each RAID 5 set, 25% of capacity is used for parity overhead if you make that five disks per RAID 5 set, this percentage drops to 20%. As you make each RAID 5 set larger, this loss percentage goes down. Since each underlying RAID 5 array requires a minimum of three disks (RAID 5 rules), and you lose the capacity of one disk to parity, you'll never "lose" more than 33% of your total capacity when using RAID 5. With RAID 10, you always lose 50% of your capacity due to mirroring. However, if you compare RAID 50 and RAID 10, you'll see a clear winner in RAID 50 from a capacity perspective. With RAID 50, you need to allocate one disk per underlying array for parity, so you're left with less usable space than you would have if you simply used RAID 5. In Figure A, this would mean that, if all 12 disks were in a single RAID 5 set, you'd be left with 11 disks worth of capacity. RAID 5 requires 1/#disks worth of space per RAID array. Here are some pros and cons about using RAID 50. There are a number of reasons why I like RAID 50, but there are also tradeoffs to using this RAID level. The beauty of RAID 50 lies in the "0" part of the RAID level this is where information is striped across each of those underlying individual RAID 5 sets. For the example above, this means that each RAID set will lose 25% of its total capacity to parity information, as would be the case if you were to deploy a single four-disk RAID 5 set. Each RAID 5 set has four disks, with one disk's worth of capacity dedicated to parity information.
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As one of the many multilevel RAID options that are out there, RAID 50 operates by striping (RAID 0) data across multiple RAID 5 sets ( Figure A).Īs you can see in the diagram, there are three RAID 5 sets that span a total of 12 disks. If you haven't used RAID 50 before, you're in for a treat. Although RAID 50 support is not in every product (for example, my EMC AX4 at Westminster College does not support RAID 50), I find that RAID 50 provides a great balance between storage performance, storage capacity, and data integrity that's not necessarily found in other RAID levels.