Requirements for RAID 5 Volumes

• A RAID 5 volume must consist of at least three components. The more components a RAID 5 volume contains, however, the longer read and write operations take when a component fails.

• RAID 5 volumes cannot be striped, concatenated, or mirrored.

• Do not create a RAID 5 volume from a component that contains an existing file system. Doing so will erase the data during the RAID 5 initialization process.

• When you create a RAID 5 volume, you can define the interlace value. If not specified, the interlace value is 16 Kbytes. This value is reasonable for most applications.

• A RAID 5 volume (with no hot spares) can only handle a single component failure.

• When you create RAID 5 volumes, use components across separate controllers, because controllers and associated cables tend to fail more often than disks.

• Use components of the same size. Creating a RAID 5 volume with components of different sizes results in unused disk space.