RAID Compariso

RAID Level Min Drives Protection RAID 0 2 None

RAID 1

Single Drive Failure

RAID 5

Single Drive Failure

RAID 6

2 Drive Failure

RAID 10

1 Disk Per Mirrored Stripe (not same mirror)

RAID 50

1 Disk Per Mirrored Stripe

RAID 60

2 Disks Per Mirrored Stripe

RAID Comparison Chart

Description Strengths Highest performance Data striping without redundancy Very high performance; Very high data protection; Very good on write performance Disk mirroring Best cost/performance for transaction-oriented networks; Very high performance, very high data protection; Supports multiple simultaneous reads and writes; Can also be optimized for large, sequential requests Offers Solid Performance with the additional fault tolerance of allowing availability to data if 2 disks in a RAID group to fail. Recommended to use more drives in RAID group to make up for performance and disk utilization hits compared to RAID 5 Same as RAID 5 with x2 Parity distributed across an extra drive Highest performance, highest data protection (can tolerate multiple drive failures) Combination of RAID 0 (data striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring) Highest performance, highest data protection (can tolerate multiple drive failures) Combination of RAID 0 (data striping) and RAID 5 (Single Parity Drive) Highest performance, highest data protection (can tolerate multiple drive failures) Combination of RAID 0 (data striping) and RAID 6 (Dual Parity Drives)

Block-level data striping with distributed parity

Chart
Weaknesses No data protection; One drive fails, all data is lost High redundancy cost overhead; Because all data is duplicated, twice the storage capacity is required Write performance is slower than RAID 0 or RAID 1 Typical Apps High End Workstations, Data Logging, Real-Time Rendering, Transitory Data Operating Systems, Transactional Databases

Data Warehousing, Web, Archiving, Basic File Servers, Disk Backup

Must use a minimum of 5 drives with High Availability Solutions, Mission 2 of them used for parity so disk Critical Apps, Servers with Large utilization is not as high as RAID 3/5. Capacity Requirements Performance is slightly lower than RAID 5

High redundancy cost overhead; Because all data is duplicated, twice the storage capacity is required; Requires minimum of four drives High redundancy cost overhead; Because all data is duplicated, twice the storage capacity is required; Requires minimum of four drives High redundancy cost overhead; Because all data is duplicated, twice the storage capacity is required; Requires minimum of four drives

Databases, Application Servers

Databases, File Servers, Application Servers,

High Availability Solutions, Mission Critical Apps, Servers with Large Capacity Requirements