In RAID 3, the Data blocks are striped and written on either two or more disks. An additional disk is used to store parity information. Stripe parity is generated on every write operation, and is recorded on the parity disk. These parity bits are checked on read operations. With the use of parity, a RAID 3 stripe set is capable of handling a single disk failure without loss of data or access to it. RAID 3 requires minimum of three disks in array.
Advantages:
High data transfer rate for both read and write operations.
Disk failures have insignificant impact on the throughput of RAID 3.
Disadvantages
Complicated to implement.
Resource intensive to implement as software RAID.
Performance is comparatively low for random and minute I/O functions.
