Data is striped at a byte level across multiple drives and parity information is distributed among all member drives. Which RAID level is represented here?

Data is striped at a byte level across multiple drives and parity information is distributed among all member drives. Which RAID level is represented here?

• A. RAID Level 0
• B. RAID Level 1
• C. RAID Level 3
• D. RAID Level 5

Answer: (D)

Distributed parity across all member drives with data striped across them is the hallmark of RAID 5. In this setup, data is written in stripes across multiple disks, and parity information is not kept on just one disk but rotates among all disks in the array. This means you gain redundancy without dedicating a single drive to parity, so if one drive fails, the missing data can be reconstructed from the parity and the remaining data blocks on the other drives. With N drives, you effectively use (N-1) drives for data and one drive for parity in each stripe, giving you fault tolerance for a single drive failure and good read performance due to striping. It’s different from RAID 0, which has no redundancy; RAID 1, which uses mirroring; and RAID 3, which uses a dedicated parity drive. This combination—striped data with parity distributed across all drives—best matches RAID 5.

Distributed parity across all member drives with data striped across them is the hallmark of RAID 5. In this setup, data is written in stripes across multiple disks, and parity information is not kept on just one disk but rotates among all disks in the array. This means you gain redundancy without dedicating a single drive to parity, so if one drive fails, the missing data can be reconstructed from the parity and the remaining data blocks on the other drives. With N drives, you effectively use (N-1) drives for data and one drive for parity in each stripe, giving you fault tolerance for a single drive failure and good read performance due to striping. It’s different from RAID 0, which has no redundancy; RAID 1, which uses mirroring; and RAID 3, which uses a dedicated parity drive. This combination—striped data with parity distributed across all drives—best matches RAID 5.