Compact Two-Dimensional RAID Level 6 Arrays Tolerating Quadruple Node Failures: Extended Abstract

Reed-Solomon codes [1] have been widely used for protecting data against data losses caused by device failures. For instance, the BackBlaze cloud backup service relies on a 17-out-of-20 RS code to ensure the integrity of its users' data [2]. They split every incoming file into 17 equal-size shards and calculate 3 parity shards so that the file contents can be reconstructed from any 17 of these 20 shards. The main advantage of this approach is its very low space overhead, as only 3 out of the 20 shards contain redundant data.