What RAID4 protection is

RAID4 provides single-parity disk protection against single-disk failure within a RAID group. If an aggregate is configured for RAID4 protection, Data ONTAP reconstructs the data from a single failed disk within a RAID group and transfers that reconstructed data to a spare disk.

The minimum number of disks in a RAID4 group is two: at least one data disk and one parity disk.

If there is a single data or parity disk failure in a RAID4 group, Data ONTAP replaces the failed disk in the RAID group with a spare disk and uses the parity data to reconstruct the failed disk’s data on the replacement disk. If no spare disks are available, Data ONTAP goes into degraded mode and alerts you of this condition.

Attention: With RAID4, if there is a second disk failure before data can be reconstructed from the data on the first failed disk, there will be data loss. To avoid data loss when two disks fail, you can select RAID-DP. This provides two parity disks to protect you from data loss when two disk failures occur in the same RAID group before the first failed disk can be reconstructed.