What is RAID 6? By the way, do you know what is RAID? RAID is also known as Redundant Arrays of independent drives. It is a technology that supports the integrated use of two or more hard-drives in various configurations for the purposes of achieving greater performance, reliability through redundancy, and larger disk volume sizes through aggregation.

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It is like RAID 5 but with two parity blocks instead of one

RAID 6 is new to me. It extends RAID 5 by adding an additional parity block, thus it uses block-level striping with two parity blocks distributed across all member disks. It was not one of the original RAID levels. RAID 6 is good for large amount of drives. It uses up 2 drives for parity blocks. For example, if you have 8 drives in total, you can only use 6 drives for data while 2 drives are for parity blocks.

The read performance is same as RAID 5. However, its write performance is poorer than RAID 5 due to overhead associated with the additional parity calculations. But it does better than RAID 5 on file data protection because RAID 6 provides protection against double disk failures and failures while a single disk is rebuilding. RAID 5 fails to do so.

I will stick to RAID 5 for the moment as I still did not face double disk failures or disk failures while a single disk is rebuilding. If budget allow, there is no harm to use RAID 6 as it gives more protection than RAID 5. :D

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