A RAID 5 uses block-level striping with parity data distributed across all member disks. Generally, RAID 5 is implemented with hardware support for parity calculations.
RAID 5, 4 disks, forward rotation
Every time a block is written to a disk in a RAID 5, a parity block is generated within the same stripe. A block is often composed of many consecutive sectors on a disk. A series of blocks (a block from each of the disks in an array) is collectively called a "stripe".
