I'm reading a book talking about RAID 5. For writes (only), it says:
In the case when: "The write changes exactly one disk. The parity context doesn't need to be recovered, since we can compute it just as if the disk had failed. The write involves one write and one parity write. Performance is about 50% of a single disk."
("Parity context" in this book means the contents of that entire stripe; so saying it doesn't need to be recovered means that you don't need to read the other n-2 disks (+1 parity disk) that hold that stripe.)
I'm trying to figure how you "can compute it just as if the disk had failed". This makes no sense to me. I don't see how you could possibly get away with only 2 writes and no reads when changing just a single disk's block in a RAID 5 array. What am I missing??
(This book does have errors, and I am wondering if this is one of them.)