Infographics · Storage Architecture
RAID Levels Compared
Side-by-side reference for RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 — minimum drives, fault tolerance, read/write characteristics, capacity efficiency, and typical use cases.
Frequently asked questions
Which RAID level offers the best fault tolerance?
RAID 6 and RAID 60 tolerate two simultaneous drive failures per parity group, making them the most resilient of the commonly deployed levels in this comparison.
Which RAID level has the best read and write performance?
RAID 10 combines mirroring and striping, giving excellent read performance and very good write performance. It is the preferred level for databases and virtualisation workloads.
Why is RAID 0 considered the riskiest?
RAID 0 stripes data across drives with no redundancy at all. A single drive failure causes total loss of the array, so it is only appropriate for scratch or cache volumes.
How much usable capacity does RAID 5 provide?
RAID 5 provides (n-1)/n of the raw capacity, where n is the number of drives. With 6 drives that is roughly 83% usable; one drive worth of capacity is consumed by parity.