Double parity sparing for improvement of performance and reliability in disk arrays

RAID level 5 disk arrays provide reliable, cost-effective secondary storage with high performance. Sparing schemes have been proposed to improve the reliability and the performance of RAID 5 disk arrays. In this paper, we propose a new sparing technique, double parity sparing. We evaluate the performance and reliability of the proposed scheme in various modes of operation. We present results from simulations to show that the proposed scheme offers better performance in some modes. Also, it is shown that the proposed scheme provides better reliability