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Raid 5 vs Raid 3

 
SP.PALANIAPPAN
New Member

Raid 5 vs Raid 3

What is necessity of using raid 5 in case of raid 3? what is the main difference in using raid 5 instead of raid 3 ?
3 REPLIES 3
raadek
Honored Contributor

Re: Raid 5 vs Raid 3

RAID 3 term is very rarely used, usually people name it RAID 4.

The main difference between RAID 3/4 and RAID 5 is the fact, that the former has a dedicated drive for storing parity information, what usually creates a bottleneck. RAID 5 spreads parity info accross all drives, thus elminating this problem.

This link gives a good overview of RAID levels:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/single.htm

Rgda
Don't panic! [THGTTG]
Ivan Ferreira
Honored Contributor

Re: Raid 5 vs Raid 3

RAID 3 use a single disk for parity saving, this disk could become a bottleneck. RAID 5 uses distributed parity to avoid possible performance problems.
Por que hacerlo dificil si es posible hacerlo facil? - Why do it the hard way, when you can do it the easy way?
Patrick Terlisten
Honored Contributor

Re: Raid 5 vs Raid 3

Hello,

the main difference between the raid-levels is that RAID 3 uses a dedicated disk drive for it's parity informations, and it stripes on byte level. RAID 4 uses block striping with a dedicated parity disk and RAID 5 uses block striping and distributed parity.

RAID 3 is good for sequential read I/O (multimedia, video edit...), but it will not perform very well if you're using it for sequential write I/Os. RAID 4 is much better for this usecase, but you still have a single disk for your parity informations - and that's the bottleneck. RAID 4 and RAID 4DP is still used by NetApp for their Filers.

Regards,
Patrick
Best regards,
Patrick