[mythtv-users] OT: RAID6?

[Rich West]

For a decent explanation of RAID 6:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel6-c.html

RAID 6 is primarily for fault tolerance: the simultaneous loss of two 
drives at once.  If you can afford the overhead of an additional parity 
disk and you need the level of availability, then go for it.  Otherwise, 
IMHO, it's probably overkill for most home installations.

BTW, RAID 6 random read performance is generally equivalent to RAID 5.

-Rich

>     But the parity is distributed across all drives for both RAID5 and
>     RAID6. So if you're reading more than one block RAID6 can be faster.
>     For instance, if you are reading 6 blocks, with RAID 6 they may all be
>     on different drives and so able to be read simultaneously. With RAID 5
>     at least one drive must hold two of the blocks.
>
>  
>
> Ok, I agree with that and see your point. Thanks for teh explanation.
>
> I guess one more reason for me to keep using raid6. I actually have > 
> 7TB at work on software raid6 using lots of 320 GB Seagate 7200.10 
> sata2 disks and 250 GB WDC sata1 disks...