Architectures and algorithms for on-line failure recovery in redundant disk arrays

The performance of traditional RAID Level 5 arrays is, for many applications, unacceptably poor while one of its constituent disks is non-functional. This paper describes and evaluates mechanisms by which this disk array failure-recovery performance can be improved. The two key issues addressed are the data layout, the mapping by which data and parity blocks are assigned to physical disk blocks in an array, and the reconstruction algorithm, which is the technique used to recover data that is lost when a component disk fails. The data layout techniques this paper investigates are variations on the declustered parity organiza-tion, a derivative of RAID Level 5 that allows a system to trade some of its data capacity for improved failure-recovery performance. Parity declustering improves the failure-mode performance of an array significantly, and a parity-declustered architecture is preferable to an equivalent-size multiple-grou