Is there a RAID 7?

Question

One of my friends at school was talking about a RAID, he said there was a RAID 7, as to my knowledge no such thing exists. Could someone clarify? I don't think there is but just making sure.

Solution 1

He could be getting confused in that there are 7 "levels" of RAID, but they are RAID 0 through RAID 6.

There is however a non-standard RAID 7, but it isn't a industry standard like the main levels. You can read up a bit on it here: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel7-c.html

There are a number of non-standard RAID levels, if you're interested you can read more on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_RAID_levels

Solution 2

Raid 7 is a trademarked marketing term used by the Storage Computer Corporation. The controller card uses its own CPU and combines striping and RAID-5-like storage.

Source

Solution 3

According to this site https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html RAID7 or raidz3 is like RAID5 or RAID6 but with triple parity and can withstand the loss of three drives without risk of loosing data. RAID5 can lose 1 disk, RAID6 can lose 2 disks, & RAID7 can lose 3 disks. The minimum number of disks for a RAID7 volume would be 4 but should really be used with no less then 5.

Comments

[Ian Ringrose]

On how many powerpoint sales slide sets does a term have to be before it "exists"?

[Nick]

standard Raid levels are from 0 to 6. imo, >6 surely exists as non-standard stacked variants. How many ever there are, I am certain there is yet no Raid over 9000. #GodzillaRAID

[DarkMatter]

According to the (United States Patent and Trademark Office) tmsearch.uspto.gov The trademark RAID 7 previously used by the Storage Computer Corporation has expired.

[DarkMatter]

it seems that Storage Computer Corporation went out of business in 2005

[saulius2]

Probably that's why ZFS calls it differently (raidz3).