The standard in the RAID industry for storage is RAID-6, with recovery from a double drive failure. But it’s not going to be good enough as disk capacities increase, prolonging failed disk rebuild times and so lengthening the window of unrecoverable failure if a third disk fails before the recovery from a double drive failure is complete.
Adam Levental, from Sun Fishworks, says hard drive capacity roughly doubles every year but hard drive bandwidth is pretty constant, which means it takes longer and longer to write data to fill up a drive.
“Double-parity RAID, of course, provides protection from up to two failures (data corruption or the whole drive) within a RAID stripe. The necessity of triple-parity RAID arises from the observation that while hard drive capacity has roughly followed Kryder’s law, doubling annually, hard drive throughput has improved far more modestly. Accordingly, the time to populate a replacement drive in a RAID stripe is increasing rapidly. Today, a 1TB SAS drive takes about 4 hours to fill at its theoretical peak throughput; in a real-world environment that number can easily double, and 2TB and 3TB drives expected this year and next won’t move data much faster. Those long periods spent in a degraded state increase the exposure to the bit errors and other drive failures that would in turn lead to data loss. The industry moved to double-parity RAID because one parity disk was insufficient; longer resilver times mean that we’re spending more and more time back at single-parity. From that it was obvious that double-parity will soon become insufficient (I’m working on an article that examines these phenomena quantitatively so stay tuned).”
Leventhal has added triple-parity RAID to Sun’s ZFS filesystem, calling it RAIDz3. He suggests calling it generically RAID-7 or RAID-8 might be silly. RAID-6 is often known as RAID-DP though, so RAID-TP would seem logical. Leventhal says it too could be superseded if disk capacities keep on growing.
Read Adam’s post on his implemenation of Triple-Parity RAID-Z
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