RAID level-5 stripes data and parity across all drives in the pool.
RAID level-5 offers both data protection and increased throughput. When you assign RAID level-5 to a pool, the capacity of the pool is reduced by the capacity of one drive (for data-parity storage). RAID level-5 gives you higher capacity than RAID level-1, but RAID level-1 offers better performance.
RAID level-5 requires a minimum of three drives and, depending upon the level of firmware and the stripe size, supports a maximum of 16 drives.
The following illustration is an example of a RAID level-5 logical device.
Start with four physical drives. | ![]() |
Create a pool using three of the physical drives, leaving the fourth as a hot-spare drive. | ![]() |
Then create a logical device within that pool. | ![]() |
The data is striped across the drives,
creating blocks.
Notice that the storage of the data parity (denoted by *) also is striped, and it shifts from drive to drive. A parity block (*) contains a representation of the data from the other blocks in the same stripe. For example, the parity block in the first stripe contains data representation of blocks 1 and 2.
|
![]() |
If a physical drive fails in the
pool, the data from the failed physical drive is reconstructed onto the
hot-spare drive. |
![]() |
RAID level-5 offers the following advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages | Disadvantages |
---|---|
|
Lower performance than RAID level-1 |
x-1048-ASM-00-12-EN