Tier-Code: An XOR-Based RAID-6 Code with Improved Write and Degraded-Mode Read Performance

The RAID-6 configuration is more tolerant of disk failures than other RAID levels because of its ability to tolerate two disk failures. However, previous RAID-6 codes suffer from two major overheads - the time of encoding or decoding processes plus the need to access multiple blocks when updating parities or recovering failed blocks. For example, the PS and Reed-Solomon codes do not have optimal computation complexity, while P-code, X-code and RDP-code must access multiple blocks to update parities during write operations. This work proposes a new XOR- based RAID-6 code, called Tier-code, which not only achieves the optimal parity computation complexity, but also increases the write and degraded-mode read performance compared to previous codes. It uses two tiers of coding, one at the block level and the other at the chunk level. Experimental results of software testing, simulation and ASIC synthesis for this new hierarchical code demonstrate that Tier-code can outperform the previous RAID-6 codes in both write performance and degraded-mode read performance while maintaining the optimal computation complexity in both hardware and software implementations.