RAID level-5 is generally the most desirable choice, because it offers both data protection and increased throughput. RAID level-5 gives you higher capacity than RAID level-1, but RAID level-1 offers better performance.
The RAID level-5 requires a minimum of three drives and, depending upon the level of firmware and the stripe-unit size, supports a maximum of eight or 16 drives.
You have four physical drives. | ![]() |
Create an array with three physical drives, leaving the fourth as a hot-spare drive. | ![]() |
Then, create a logical drive within the array. | ![]() |
The data is striped across the drives, creating blocks. Notice that the storage of
the data parity (denoted by the A parity block ( |
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If a hard disk drive fails in the array, the ServeRAID controller switches read and write requests to the remaining functional drive in the RAID level-5 array, which is a hot-spare drive. |
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See also
Selecting
a RAID level
RAID level-0
RAID level-1
RAID level-1
Enhanced
RAID level-5
Enhanced