With RAID-5, there's an additional benefit of write back caching, which is that the controller can buffer enough data to write full stripes at a time. The alternative is partial stripes, which require reading-then-writing the parity disk. With a full-stripe write, the parity drive is just written, and not read first. With rotating media, there is a huge performance difference, since you don't have to wait for the drive to make a full rotation before writing.




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