Found this page when i used Google to find out what the RAID5 “write hole” is. I like the explanation they have quoted from Jeff Bonwick’s Weblog:

“RAID-5 (and other data/parity schemes such as RAID-4, RAID-6, even-odd, and Row Diagonal Parity) never quite delivered on the RAID promise – and can’t – due to a fatal flaw known as the RAID-5 write hole. Whenever you update the data in a RAID stripe you must also update the parity, so that all disks XOR to zero – it’s that equation that allows you to reconstruct data when a disk fails. The problem is that there’s no way to update two or more disks atomically, so RAID stripes can become damaged during a crash or power outage.

“To see this, suppose you lose power after writing a data block but before writing the corresponding parity block. Now the data and parity for that stripe are inconsistent, and they’ll remain inconsistent forever (unless you happen to overwrite the old data with a full-stripe write at some point). Therefore, if a disk fails, the RAID reconstruction process will generate garbage the next time you read any block on that stripe. What’s worse, it will do so silently—it has no idea that it’s giving you corrupt data.”