Exercise 2: Why Large Drives Motivate a RAID 5 to RAID 6 Migration — Possible Solution ==================================================================== The specific risk: Per the chapter, RAID 5's real weakness is rebuild time: "Replacing a failed disk requires reading every remaining disk to reconstruct the failed one's data -- on large modern drives this can take many hours, and a second disk failure during that rebuild window loses the entire array." At 18TB per drive, reconstructing a failed disk means reading that same enormous amount of data back off every surviving disk in the array, which is a genuinely long operation -- the chapter names this risk as growing "directly with disk size, which is the genuine, practical reason RAID 5 is increasingly discouraged on today's largest drives." The bigger the drives, the longer the array spends in this exposed, single-failure-tolerance-already-used-up state during a rebuild, and the more real-world time there is for a second, unrelated disk in the same array to fail during that same window -- which, on RAID 5, means total data loss for the entire array, not just a further-degraded-but-still-alive state. Why RAID 6 addresses it: Per the chapter, "RAID 6... survives two simultaneous disk failures," and specifically "directly addresses RAID 5's own rebuild-window vulnerability: even if a second disk fails during the rebuild after the first, RAID 6 can still survive it." On RAID 6, the exact scenario that destroys a RAID 5 array (a second failure while still rebuilding from the first) is precisely the case RAID 6 was designed to survive, since it can tolerate two failures rather than RAID 5's one. The tradeoff the chapter names -- "write performance is worse than RAID 5... and it needs at least four disks" -- is the real cost being accepted in exchange for surviving exactly the failure mode that large, slow-to-rebuild drives make meaningfully more likely. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ This names the specific mechanism (rebuild time scaling with disk size, increasing the real-world window of exposure to a second failure) rather than a vague "RAID 6 is safer," and explains precisely which RAID 5 failure scenario RAID 6's own second-failure tolerance directly closes.