How many disks can fail in RAID 5?

If you want to work as a storage administrator, you should possess good knowledge about one of
the advanced data protection technology i.e. RAID and its levels in detail. Reason for this is that
RAID technology acts as a perfect set to provide protection against various HDD failures.
According to the experts of Data Recovery Services, you should know the three basic levels of
RAID, i.e. stripping, parity and mirroring, as these terminologies will help you to handle the
situation when disk/disks fail in RAID 5.

Disk Failure in RAID 5

Now, the main question that comes in our mind is that how many numbers of disk may fail in
RAID 5. For this, experts involved in RAID data recovery have said only a single disk failure is
desirable in RAID 5. This is because; if more than one disk fails simultaneously, RAID 5 cannot
able to retrieve the data. To understand the logic we should discuss the mentioned terminologies
in detail.

Stripping

RAID refers to the collection of multiple disks responsible to define the predefined numbers of
disk blocks addressable in a contiguous way. Experts of hard drive recovery called these disk
blocks as strips, while aligned in multiple disks to form a stripe.

Mirroring Technique

According to the technique of mirroring, you simply create a mirror copy of strips/disks to
protect them and thereby, get two different copies of important data. In the case of failure, the
controller uses second disk for recovery of the data.

Parity Technique

Experts involved in Server Data Recovery or RAID 5 disk recovery have come up with another
affordable data protection technique i.e. Parity technique. Accordingly, parity adds an additional
HDD to the existing stripe width for holding the parity bit. Parity refers to a redundancy check to
make sure about complete protection of data without any requirement to maintain a complete set
of duplicate data. Accordingly, whenever a disk fails, experts calculate the missing value by
subtracting from the sum of other elements from the value of parity bits.

Therefore, based on the concepts, we should say that only 1 disk failure is allowable in case of
RAID 5.