RAID 50 should have been called "RAID 03" because it was implemented as a striped (RAID level 0) array whose segments were RAID 3 arrays (during mid-90s)
Most current RAID 50 implementation is illustrated above
RAID 50 is more fault tolerant than RAID 5 but has twice the parity overhead
High data transfer rates are achieved thanks to its RAID 5 array segments
High I/O rates for small requests are achieved thanks to its RAID 0 striping
Maybe a good solution for sites who would have otherwise gone with RAID 5 but need some additional performance boost
Disadvantages
Very expensive to implement
All disk spindles must be synchronized, which limits the choice of drives
Failure of two drives in one of the RAID 5 segments renders the whole array unusable