Level
3 represents a more sophisticated approach. Data can be recovered
in the event of the failure of any disk, but the overall efficiency
of disk use is better than in simple mirroring (Level 1).
In
level 1 RAID (mirroring), data capacity is N/2, where N is the
total number of disks. Don't be misled by the diagram above; parity
bits for HDDs 1 and 2 would not actually fill up HDD 3. Since
parity bits take up very little storage, with level 3 RAID, data
capacity is N-1. The more disks in the array, the better the efficiency.