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With RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) 5, the data is spread across all (in this case) 3 drives, plus a parity bit. So let's say I copy a movie over... the movie is spread across HDD1 and HDD2 the parity data on HDD3. Then the next movie will be spread across HDD2 and HDD3 with the parity on HDD1. The next across HDD3 and HDD1 with parity on HDD2.
It makes it so I can recover from the failure of any ONE of the drives and not lose any data. But only one. If two of my drives shit out, I'm fucked. But, that's where RAID 6 would be better because it uses dual-parity allowing you to recover from up to 2 drive failures at the same time.
RAID 5 needs a min of 3 drives, RAID 6 needs 4, hence the reason I'm using RAID 5. RAID 6 is better for larger arrays since the more drives you have, the greater your chances of one shitting out. What becomes scary about RAID 5 is if I do lose a drive, during the time it would take to rebuild it using a new 1TB drive, I could not survive another drive failure or I would lose data. Not so with RAID 6.
RAID 4 is pretty much the same as RAID 5 except all of the parity gets stored on the same drive instead of spread across the RAID. Either way I'm still sacrificing the capacity of one drive to parity information.
RAID 3 and 2 also use parity, the difference is in how and not something I could explain.
RAID 1 is simple mirrored array. Min of 2 drives. So with 2 drives, any data written to HDD1 will also get put on HDD2. The two drives will contain the same exact data. No parity.
RAID 0 is a striped set, no parity, no mirroring. Min of 2 disks. Any data written to the array would get spread across the disks. Any disk failure will result in data lose.
Then there are hybrid systems like RAID 0+1, RAID 1+0 and RAID 5+1.
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Sound like he is running RAID 0. Which is just combining multiable drives into "one". While he may get good throughput, his data would be lost if any one of his drives failed.
It's not just SCSI drives. You can use PATA (IDE) or, in my case, SATA.