This degree program should be of interest to and is well suited for those who like working on computers and who ordinarily would also be interested in any of the mathematical sciences (mathematics, computer science, statistics), or any of the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, geological sciences, ...), or any engineering discipline.
Parity bit. A parity bit, or check bit, is a bit added to a string of binary code to ensure that the total number of 1-bits in the string is even or odd. Parity bits are used as the simplest form of error detecting code. There are two variants of parity bits: even parity bit and odd parity bit.
Instead of using an entire hard drive as a backup, RAID 5 spreads redundancy information--called parity bits--across all of the array's drives. Where RAID 1 requires 50% of available storage for redundancy, RAID 5 requires only 33%. When one of the drives in a RAID 5 array fails, the data content of that failed drive is reconstructed using the parity bits on the surviving drives and written to a new, replacement drive.