American Megatrends MegaRAID Express 500 - Manual (Page 40)

MegaRAID Express 500 Hardware Guide 26
RAID 50
RAID 50 provides the features of both RAID 0 and RAID 5. RAID 50 includes
both parity and disk striping across multiple drives. RAID 50 is best
implemented on two RAID 5 disk arrays with data striped across both disk
arrays. RAID 50 breaks up data into smaller blocks, and then stripes the blocks
of data to each RAID 5 raid set. RAID 5 breaks up data into smaller blocks,
calculates parity by performing an exclusive-or on the blocks, and then writes the
blocks of data and parity to each drive in the array. The size of each block is
determined by the stripe size parameter, which is set during the creation of the
RAID set.
RAID 50 can sustain one to four drive failures while maintaining data integrity if
each failed disk is in a different RAID 5 array.
Uses RAID 50 works best when used with data that requires high
reliability, high request rates, and high data transfer and
medium to large capacity
.
Strong Points RAID 50 provides high data throughput, data redundancy,
and very good performance.
Weak Points Requires 2 to 4 times as many parity drives as RAID 5.
Drives Six to 32