Elements of RAID 6 protection

 

This topic describes and illustrates RAID 6 protection.

The following diagrams illustrate the elements of a parity set that contains four disk units. Each parity set begins with an IOP that is attached to an IOA, which contains the write cache. The IOA transmits read and write signals to the attached disk units.

P indicates the sections of the disk that contain parity data.

Q indicates the second stripe of parity data.

Performance is improved by spreading the parity throughout each of the disk units. The total amount of protection that is spread throughout the disk units equals two disk units of memory.

 

Parent topic:

RAID 6 concepts