How does data redundancy under RAID 5 work?

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I do understand RAID 1. You have two drives that are mirrored. So when one drive fails, you have the full set of data on the other drive.

But with RAID 5 you are able to lose a complete drive out of a set of 3 for example. You have full data redundancy without sacrificing half of your capacity. How does this work?

In: 5

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Anonymous 0 Comments

So this is because the parity information is striped across all the disks. Each disk holds unique parity information for each other disk. If disk 0 has parity for A, and the other disks have the A data split between them, if disk 0 is lost then there is no loss of data. If, for example, disk 1 is lost, the remaining data and parity can recover the lost data. Now repeat that process staggering the parity information across each drive and you have RAID 5

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