Which RAID Option is right for you? RAID Levels Explained

July 20, 2015

There are many RAID options available, and it can be hard to know which option is best for you. By following this guide, you can determine which of the RAID options is best for your hosting and what drive sizes to use.

In general, with all forms of RAID you want identical drives, so different drive sizes or other specs can cause problems such as wasted capacity or slower read/write speeds.

The first of the RAID options is RAID 0. With RAID 0, each disk in the set behaves as a single disk through a process called striping. The main advantage here is the speed at which data is written. Data is written in a roughly equal amount on each drive and written to each disk at the same time. If one drive crashes, this array is broken, and usually leads to data loss.

The next RAID option is RAID 1. The data is written identically to two or more drives (data mirroring). This can improve data access speed, but slow down data write speed. A best practice to make sure the drive sizes are identical for all drives involved. If one drive crashes, this array can continue to function because the data is duplicated among the drives.

The next common RAID option is RAID 5. RAID 5 is generally the most common of RAID options for business servers or enterprise NAS devices. RAID 5 requires at least 3 disks. RAID 5 also uses a parity block on each disk, so if one disk fails, your entire array is not lost as long as it is replaced before another fails.

RAID 6 is the next RAID option, and is almost the same as RAID 5, it just uses an extra parity block, which means two disks can crash and the system will still function correctly.

The last common RAID option is RAID 10 (or 1+0). RAID 10 requires at least 4 disks and combines the striping of RAID 0 with the mirroring of RAID 10. It provides the best read and write performance, but is the most costly.

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