Carlos M. Martinez-Cagnazzo

I came accross an article claiming that RAID 5 will stop working in 2009. Judging from the title I first guessed that it may had something to do with the checksumming algorithm and timestamps (in an Y2K-ish kind of way). Gladly it was nothing of the sort.

The author claims that due to increasing capacity in hard drives while speed remaining more or less constant (or growing less), in 2009, with 2 TB hard drives in a large array the probability of a second failure in the array during reconstruction becomes worryingly noticeable.

Well, I am not that sure. Maybe if you have a combination of: (a) not using hot-spare drives, (b) using a plain RAID5 controller with no additional intelligence and (c) using single-controller arrays you can find yourself in such a situation.

Personally I will keep on using RAID5 for my arrays. If I need extra reliability at some point, RAID 10 or RAID 5 + mirroring / stripping will be the way to go.