Can RAID 1 have more than two drives?

Solution 1:

You can use as many drives as you want for RAID1. They will all be mirrored, and written on at the same time, and be exact copies of each other. The fact that there isn't a card that do more than x drives doesn't meant anything about the concept. RAID1 is just mirroring your disks, and you can have as many mirrors as you want.

Also, your view of RAID5/6 is erroneous. The parity is distributed on all the drives, there isn't a dedicated drive for that. Compared to raid5, raid6 adds an additional parity block, which is also distributed.

You can find more info on wikipedia.

Solution 2:

There is a lot of misunderstanding of RAID levels.

JBoD is Just a Bunch of Drives, where you can see multiple drives in the same box, this is a most confused non-raid term.

Years ago, some RAID manufacturers could not make a truly JBOD with their RAID engine, they call SPAN (BIG) as JBoD.

RAID1 is a Mirror RAID and it needs TWO HDDs to mirror each other. Whereas CLONE is a Multiple Duplicate HDD with the same volume, for example DAT Optic's eBOX, sBOX (hardware RAID). Hardware RAID boxes generally offer RAID 0, 1, 5, CLONE, Large, and Hot spare.

As for RAID 5/6, both have the parity space portion equal to one drive for RAID5 and two drives for RAID6.

The most common mistaken knowledge is that parity data is located in a dedicated drive(s). That is incorrect. The party space is divided equally among the RAID member HDDs.

Example: RAID5 from five HDD, each of the drives will have 1/5 of space allocated for parity, whereas for RAID6, each drive will have 2/5 of space allocated for parity.

For those who want to argue, if there is a dedicated parity drive(s), let's assume there is, what happens to the RAID if the dedicated parity drive fails? The RAID can not be rebuilt because the data needed to rebuild is no longer there.