In order to achieve high reliability in disk array systems, two new schemes
using dual parity placement, called DH1 (diagonal-horizontal) and DH2 sche
mes, are presented. Both DH schemes can tolerate up to two disk failures by
using two types of parity information placed in the diagonal and the horiz
ontal directions, respectively, in a matrix of disk partitions. DH1 scheme
can reduce the occurrences of the bottleneck problem significantly because
the parity blocks are evenly distributed throughout the disk array. DH2 sch
eme uses one more disk than DH1 scheme in order to store the horizontal par
ities, while the diagonal parities are placed in the same way as in DH1 sch
eme with a minor change. Even though both DH schemes use almost optimal dis
k space for storing the redundant information, the encoding algorithms for
them are quite simple and efficient. Moreover, both DH schemes can recover
rapidly from any two disk failures. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All righ
ts reserved.