A RAID-5 set of N drives with a capacity of C MB per drive provides
the capacity of C * (N - 1) MB, and protects against a failure
of a single drive. For a given sector (row) number, (N - 1) drives
contain data sectors, and one drive contains the parity protection.
For a RAID-4 set, the parity blocks are present on a single drive,
while a RAID-5 set distributes the parity across the drives in one
of the available parity distribution methods.

A RAID-6 set of N drives with a capacity of C MB per drive
provides the capacity of C * (N - 2) MB, and protects
against a failure of any two drives. For a given sector
(row) number, (N - 2) drives contain data sectors, and two
drives contains two independent redundancy syndromes. Like
RAID-5, RAID-6 distributes the syndromes across the drives
in one of the available parity distribution methods.

Information about Software RAID on Linux is contained in the
Software-RAID mini-HOWTO, available from
<http://www.tldp.org/docs.html#howto>. There you will also
learn where to get the supporting user space utilities raidtools.

If you want to use such a RAID-4/RAID-5/RAID-6 set, say Y. To
compile this code as a module, choose M here: the module
will be called raid456.

If unsure, say Y.

source code:

drivers/md/