Which RAID level uses disk striping with parity distributed across drives?

Which RAID level uses disk striping with parity distributed across drives?

• A. RAID Level 0
• B. RAID Level 3
• C. RAID Level 5
• D. RAID Level 1

Answer: (C)

Disk striping with parity distributed across drives is a feature of RAID 5. In this setup data is written in stripes across several disks and a parity block is included with each stripe, with the parity location rotating among the drives. This arrangement provides fault tolerance: if one drive fails, the missing data can be reconstructed from the remaining data and the parity. The parity is not stored on a single disk, which makes better use of storage capacity compared to formats with a dedicated parity disk. This approach differs from RAID 0, which strips data without any parity and has no fault tolerance; RAID 1, which mirrors data on paired drives; and RAID 3, which uses byte-level striping with a dedicated parity disk rather than distributing parity.

Disk striping with parity distributed across drives is a feature of RAID 5. In this setup data is written in stripes across several disks and a parity block is included with each stripe, with the parity location rotating among the drives. This arrangement provides fault tolerance: if one drive fails, the missing data can be reconstructed from the remaining data and the parity. The parity is not stored on a single disk, which makes better use of storage capacity compared to formats with a dedicated parity disk. This approach differs from RAID 0, which strips data without any parity and has no fault tolerance; RAID 1, which mirrors data on paired drives; and RAID 3, which uses byte-level striping with a dedicated parity disk rather than distributing parity.