A high-bandwidth mode Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) level in which both user data and redundancy data (parity) are striped across the disk drives. The equivalent of one disk drive’s capacity is used for redundancy data. RAID Level 3 is good for large data transfers in applications, such as multimedia or medical imaging, that read and write large sequential blocks of data.
If a single disk drive fails in a RAID Level 3 array, all associated logical drives become degraded, but the redundancy data allows access to the data. If two or more disk drives fail in a RAID Level 3 array, all associated logical drives fail, and all data is lost.