RAID 50

What Does RAID 50 Mean?

RAID 50 is a type of nested RAID level that utilizes the block-level striping of RAID 0 and has better write or I/O capabilities than standard RAID 5, along with improved fault tolerance. However, it utilizes more disk space for parity information.

Techopedia Explains RAID 50

RAID 50 primarily provides higher data transfer rates and similar performance in smaller I/O requests. However, if two disks fail, the RAID 50 array cannot continue to function. It requires at least five drives to construct this array, and each disk spindle must be synchronized with each other. It dedicates 25% of RAID set space to parity information or stripes parity information across all RAID sets.

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Margaret Rouse

Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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