21 RAID 50 Logical Drive

A RAID 50 logical drive is built from six to forty-eight disk drives configured as two or more RAID 5 arrays, and stripes stored data and parity data across all disk drives in both RAID 5 logical drives. (For more information, see RAID 5 Logical Drives.)

The parity data provides data protection, and striping improves performance. RAID 50 logical drives also provide high data transfer speeds.

Drive segment size is limited to the size of the smallest disk drive in the logical drive. For example, three 250 GB disk drives and three 400 GB disk drives comprise two equal-sized RAID 5 logical drives with 500 GB of stored data and 250 GB of parity data. The RAID 50 logical drive can therefore contain 1000 GB (2 x 500 GB) of stored data and 500 GB of parity data.

In this figure, P represents the distributed parity data.