SOSRAID-6: A Self-Organized Strategy of RAID-6 in the Degraded Mode

The distinct benefit of RAID-6 is that it provides higher reliability than the other RAID levels for tolerating double disk failures. Whereas, when a disk fails the read/write operations on the failed disk will be redirected to all the surviving disks, which will increase the burden of the surviving disks, the probability of the disk failure and the energy consumption along with the degraded performance issue. In this paper, we present a Self-Organized Strategy (SOS) to improve the performance of RAID-6 in the degraded mode. SOS organizes the data on the failed disks to the corresponding parity locations on first access. Then the later accesses to the failed disks will be redirected to the parity locations rather than all the surviving disks. Besides the performance improvement the SOSRAID-6 reduces the failure probability of the survived disks and is more energy efficient compared with the Traditional RAID-6. With the theoretical evaluation we find that the SOSRAID-6 is more powerful than the TRAID-6.