For myself or any machines I managed for work that do not need high IOPS, I would definitely choose triple- or quad-parity over RAID 51 or similar schemes with arrays of 16 - 32 drives. No need to go into detail here on a subject Adam Leventhal has already covered in detail in an article "Triple-Parity RAID and Beyond" which seems to match the subject of this thread quite nicely: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1670144 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html