Home | Contents | Help   Raidhelp     Proprietary: Defining RAID Level 6 - Disk Striping with Distributed Parity+ This level can mean many things to many people. Most often used as a vendor-specific term, RAID Level 6 is a further development of RAID Level 5. It provides for two disks to fail either simultaneously, or a second disk to fail during a reconstruction period. This is a achieved by two independent error correction schemes and by two independent regeneration and reconstruction capabilities. Although capable of ultra-high data reliability, the write penalty is inherently more severe than it is with RAID Level 5. As with RAID Level 5, the RAID Level 6 write penalty is mitigated by other related storage technologies such as caching. Higher levels of reliability and availability are also achieved by distributing the redundant information rather than dedicating disks to the redundant information. RAID 6 has a complex control design, and the overhead to compute parity addresses is extremely high. Related topics: Defining RAID Levels Understanding Parity       Raidhelp   RAIDhelp© Copyright 1999-2004 Antony Kershaw