The concept of parity-based RAID (levels 3, 5 and 6) is now pretty old in technological terms, and the technology’s limitations will become pretty clear in the not-too-distant future ‚Äî and are probably obvious to some users already. In my opinion, RAID-6 is a reliability Band Aid for RAID-5, and going from one parity drive to two is simply delaying the inevitable.
The bottom line is this: Disk density has increased far more than performance and hard error rates haven’t changed much, creating much greater RAID rebuild times and a much higher risk of data loss. In short, it’s a scenario that will eventually require a solution, if not a whole new way of storing and protecting data.
We’ll start with a short history of RAID, or at least the last 15 years of it, and then discuss the problems in greater detail and offer some possible solutions…
