Users Guide

RAID 6 characteristics:
• Groups n disks as one large virtual disk with a capacity of (n-2) disks.
• Redundant information (parity) is alternately stored on all disks.
• The virtual disk remains functional with up to two disk failures. The data is reconstructed from the surviving disks.
• Better read performance, but slower write performance.
• Increased redundancy for protection of data.
• Two disks per span are required for parity. RAID 6 is more expensive in terms of disk space.
RAID level 50 (striping over RAID 5 sets)
RAID 50 is striping over more than one span of physical disks. For example, a RAID 5 disk group that is implemented with three
physical disks and then continues on with a disk group of three more physical disks would be a RAID 50.
It is possible to implement RAID 50 even when the hardware does not directly support it. In this case, you can implement more than
one RAID 5 virtual disks and then convert the RAID 5 disks to dynamic disks. You can then create a dynamic volume that is spanned
across all RAID 5 virtual disks.
RAID 50 characteristics:
• Groups n*s disks as one large virtual disk with a capacity of s*(n-1) disks, where s is the number of spans and n is the number of
disks within each span.
• Redundant information (parity) is alternately stored on all disks of each RAID 5 span.
• Better read performance, but slower write performance.
• Requires as much parity information as standard RAID 5.
• Data is striped across all spans. RAID 50 is more expensive in terms of disk space.
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