EMC Information Storage Fundamentals — Question 2

An application generates 8400 small random I/Os at peak workloads with a read/write ratio of 2:1. What is the disk load at peak activity for a RAID 5 configuration?

Answer options

• A. 4800
• B. 11200
• C. 16800
• D. 22400

Correct answer: C

Explanation

In a RAID 5 configuration, data is striped across multiple disks with parity information. For every write operation, RAID 5 requires the reading of the old data and the parity block, leading to increased I/O. Given the read/write ratio of 2:1, the total disk load calculates to 16800 I/Os, making option C the correct answer. The other options do not account for the necessary overhead of parity in write operations.