Users Guide

• 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.
RAID level 60 - striping over RAID 6 sets
RAID 60 is striping over more than one span of physical disks that are configured as a RAID 6. For example, a RAID 6 disk group that is
implemented with four physical disks and then continues on with a disk group of four more physical disks would be a RAID 60.
184
Managing storage devices