What do you need to know about RAID?

My knowledge on RAID is a bit weak so I've been brushing up, but there are alot of flavours.

Which are the most common in business and school environments?

Find more posts tagged with

SAVE $250 on Your Boot Camp — Use Code "EXAM26"

Exclusively for TechExams members for Infosec Boot Camps starting before April 30, 2026

View Boot Camps

Comments

QHalo

Typicall you'll see 1, 5, 6, DP or 4 (if you work with NetApp), 10 and 50. There are others but I've never used them in a business environment.

kriscamaro68

Raid 5 and 10 I would say are the most used. Raid 1 is also used but not as much. Raid 0 is really only used on gaming machines since there is no fault tolerance.

Bloogen

SMB IT Journal » Blog Archive » Choosing RAID for Hard Drives in 2013

slinuxuzer

One thing I would tell you about raid is this, most newbie server admins use raid 5 heavily, they will do this because it yields the highest usable space, while this is probably fine for a big majority of workloads, the performance differences between raid-5 and raid-10 are considerable, so if your designing for performance doing some additional research is worthwhile.

ChooseLife

cerebro wrote: »

which are the most common in business and school environments?

raid 10, 1, 5

Chard26

This is all you need to know about RAID

Water Cooler RAID | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

PurpleIT

slinuxuzer wrote: »

One thing I would tell you about raid is this, most newbie server admins use raid 5 heavily, they will do this because it yields the highest usable space, while this is probably fine for a big majority of workloads, the performance differences between raid-5 and raid-10 are considerable, so if your designing for performance doing some additional research is worthwhile.

This difference is really most evident when writing data to the array. I am a big fan of 5 for big data stores that have either (relatively) static content or small office files that are not updated hundreds of times a day.

slinuxuzer

PurpleIT wrote: »

This difference is really most evident when writing data to the array. I am a big fan of 5 for big data stores that have either (relatively) static content or small office files that are not updated hundreds of times a day.

Correct, the write penalty for raid 5 is (4) and the write penalty for raid 10 is (2), I didn't want to go into a detailed discussion of IOPS, generally speaking if your building a SQL or database server, try to put the databases on raid-10.