Windows 8 In Depth

Creating a RAID 5 Volume

So far you’ve seen that you can mimic an expandable storage pool by creating a spanned volume that stores data in a single storage area that encompasses two or more hard drives (see “Creating a Spanned Volume”). Similarly, you saw that you can add resiliency by creating mirrored volumes that store each file and folder on two or more hard drives (see “Creating Mirrored Volumes”). These easy-to-implement techniques can be really useful, depending on your data and safety needs.

However, we want to show you a third technique that combines spanning and mirroring, and also includes a bit of load balancing (writing to a second hard drive if one hard drive is busy). This is called RAID 5, and it has the following characteristics: ...