How is RAID3/4 is implemented for more than 4 drives?
I understand that, RAID 3/4 for 4 drives is: Parity Drive = D1 XOR D2 XOR D3. But what is there 5 drives or more? For example 5 or 6. How many parity drives is needed, and how XOR algorithm is working for this case?
Solution 1:
Any number of bits can be XOR'd, and you can always regenerate the data of a failed drive by XORing all the other drives.
This means that this algorithm can only replace a single failed disk, regardless of how many disks are in the array, and it needs to know which disk has failed.
For RAID6, a second checksum disk is used that uses a different algorithm, so the data can still be reconstructed if (any) two disks fail.