---
created_at: '2014-06-01T18:53:12.000Z'
title: Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009 (2007)
url: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162
author: pmoriarty
points: 56
story_text: ''
comment_text: 
num_comments: 77
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1401648792
_tags:
- story
- author_pmoriarty
- story_7830213
objectID: '7830213'

---
The storage version of Y2k? No, it's a function of capacity growth and
RAID 5's limitations. If you are thinking about SATA RAID for home or
business use, or using RAID today, you need to know why.

RAID 5 protects against a single disk failure. You can recover all your
data if a single disk breaks. The problem: once a disk breaks, there is
another increasingly common failure lurking. And in 2009 it is highly
certain it will find you.

**Disks fail** While disks are incredibly reliable devices, they do
fail. Our best data - from CMU and Google - finds that over 3% of drives
fail each year in the first three years of drive life, and then failure
rates start rising fast.

With 7 brand new disks, you have ~20% chance of seeing a disk failure
each year. Factor in the rising failure rate with age and over 4 years
you are almost certain to see a disk failure during the life of those
disks.

But you're protected by RAID 5, right? Not in 2009.

**Reads fail** SATA drives are commonly specified with an unrecoverable
read error rate (URE) of 10^14. Which means that once every
100,000,000,000,000 bits, the disk will very politely tell you that, so
sorry, but I really, truly can't read that sector back to you.

One hundred trillion bits is about 12 terabytes. Sound like a lot? Not
in 2009.

**Disk capacities double** Disk drive capacities double every 18-24
months. We have 1 TB drives now, and in 2009 we'll have 2 TB drives.

With a 7 drive RAID 5 disk failure, you'll have 6 remaining 2 TB drives.
As the RAID controller is busily reading through those 6 disks to
reconstruct the data from the failed drive, it is almost certain it will
see an URE.

So the read fails. And when that happens, you are one unhappy camper.
The message "we can't read this RAID volume" travels up the chain of
command until an error message is presented on the screen. 12 TB of your
carefully protected - you thought\! - data is gone. Oh, you didn't back
it up to tape? Bummer\!

**So now what?** The obvious answer, and the one that storage marketers
have begun trumpeting, is RAID 6, which protects your data against 2
failures. Which is all well and good, until you consider this: as drives
increase in size, any drive failure will always be accompanied by a read
error. So RAID 6 will give you no more protection than RAID 5 does now,
but you'll pay more anyway for extra disk capacity and slower write
performance.

Gee, paying more for less\! I can hardly wait\!

**The Storage Bits take** Users of enterprise storage arrays have less
to worry about: your tiny costly disks have less capacity and thus a
smaller chance of encountering an URE. And your spec'd URE rate of 10^15
also helps.

There are some other fixes out there as well, some fairly obvious and
some, I'm certain, waiting for someone much brighter than me to invent.
But even today a 7 drive RAID 5 with 1 TB disks has a 50% chance of a
rebuild failure. RAID 5 is reaching the end of its useful life.

**Update:** I've clearly tapped into a rich vein of RAID folklore. Just
to be clear I'm talking about a failed drive (i.e. all sectors are gone)
plus an URE on another sector during a rebuild. With 12 TB of capacity
in the remaining RAID 5 stripe and an URE rate of 10^14, you are highly
likely to encounter a URE. Almost certain, if the drive vendors are
right.

As well-informed commenter Liam Newcombe notes:

> The key point that seems to be missed in many of the comments is that
> when a disk fails in a RAID 5 array and it has to rebuild there is a
> significant chance of a non-recoverable read error during the rebuild
> (BER / UER). As there is no longer any redundancy the RAID array
> cannot rebuild, this is not dependent on whether you are running
> Windows or Linux, hardware or software RAID 5, it is simple
> mathematics. An honest RAID controller will log this and generally
> abort, allowing you to restore undamaged data from backup onto a fresh
> array.

Thus my comment about hoping you have a backup.

Mr. Newcombe, just as I was beginning to like him, then took me to task
for stating that "RAID 6 will give you no more protection than RAID 5
does now". What I had hoped to communicate is this: in a few years - if
not 2009 then not long after - all SATA RAID failures will consist of a
disk failure + URE.

RAID 6 will protect you against this quite nicely, just as RAID 5
protects against a single disk failure today. In the future, though, you
will require RAID 6 to protect against single disk failures + the
inevitable URE and so, effectively, RAID 6 in a few years will give you
no more protection than RAID 5 does today. This isn't RAID 6's fault.
Instead it is due to the increasing capacity of disks and their steady
URE rate. RAID 5 won't work at all, and, instead, RAID 6 will replace
RAID 5.

Originally the developers of RAID suggested RAID 6 as a means of
protecting against 2 disk failures. As we now know, a single disk
failure means a second disk failure is much more likely - see the CMU
pdf [Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000
Hours Mean to You?](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bianca/fast07.pdf) for
details - or check out my synopsis in [Everything You Know About Disks
Is Wrong](http://storagemojo.com/?p=383). RAID 5 protection is a little
dodgy today due to this effect and RAID 6 - in a few years - won't be
able to help.

Finally, I recalculated the AFR for 7 drives using the 3.1% AFR from the
CMU paper, using the formula suggested by a couple of readers - 1-96.9
^\# of disks - and got 19.8%. So I changed the ~23% number to ~20%.

**Comments welcome, of course.** I revisited this piece in 2013 in [Has
RAID5 stopped working?](/article/has-raid5-stopped-working/)  Now that
we have 6TB drives - some with the same 10^14 URE - the problem is worse
than ever.
