Every production team, whether a small workgroup or a global facility, needs storage that keeps media safe and available. The kind of protection you need depends on scale. That’s why EditShare EFS uses two layers of redundancy:
- RAID 6 inside each node for intra-drive-level protection in smaller setups
- XOR parity distributes data and parity blocks across multiple nodes, enabling recovery from the complete failure of a single node
This approach ensures you get the right balance of efficiency, performance, and resilience at any size.
Protection for Small Teams: RAID 6
On a single node, EFS uses RAID 6. This means your system can survive two drive failures in that node without losing access to your media. For many small teams, that’s enough resilience to keep projects moving while drives are swapped out.
Protection for Large Teams: XOR Across Nodes
When you grow into three or more nodes, EFS adds cluster-level protection. This is where XOR parity comes in.
XOR (short for Exclusive OR) is the math behind parity. It works by comparing blocks of data across drives and recording a checksum. If one drive or even an entire node is lost, the system can rebuild the missing data by recalculating it from the remaining blocks.
In EFS, this means:
- The cluster can tolerate the failure of a full node, in an EFS 310 deployment up to 16 drives, without taking your media offline.
- Your system doesn't lose a heartbeat, nor does it lose bandwidth, as we have calculated that level of protection into the bandwidth numbers we provide you.
- Recovery is faster than with traditional RAID because data and parity are spread across multiple nodes, reducing stress on any single drive.
Why Not Mirroring?
Mirroring works by duplicating everything, which is simple but expensive, you lose half your storage capacity to redundancy. At the Petabyte scale, that cost adds up quickly. EFS gives you stronger protection without wasting space.
Bottom Line
For small systems, RAID 6 keeps your media safe at the drive level. As you scale, XOR parity across nodes takes protection further, guarding against node failures while maintaining performance and efficiency.
With EFS, you don’t have to rethink storage as you grow; resilience and linear bandwidth scale with you.
Discover how EFS protects your media
