RAID Calculator

RAID 0 — This configuration has striping but no redundancy of data. It offers the best performance, but it does not provide fault tolerance.

RAID 1 — Disk mirroring, also known as RAID 1, is the replication of data to two or more disks. Disk mirroring is a good choice for applications that require high performance and high availability, such as transactional applications, email and operating systems.

RAID 3 — This configuration combines parity and striping with stored parity bits on a dedicated disk, it requires at least three separate hard disks - two for striping data and one for storing parity bits. The disks must spin in sync, so sequential read/write (R/W) operations achieve good performance.

RAID 4 — This configuration that uses block-level data striping and a dedicated disk for storing parity bits. It does not require synchronized spinning, and each disk functions independently when single data blocks are requested.

RAID 5 — This level is based on parity block-level striping. The parity information is striped across each drive, enabling the array to function, even if one drive were to fail. The array's architecture enables read and write operations to span multiple drives. This results in performance better than that of a single drive, but not as high as a RAID 0 array.

RAID 6 — This technique is similar to RAID 5, but it includes a second parity scheme distributed across the drives in the array. The use of additional parity enables the array to continue functioning, even if two disks fail simultaneously. However, this extra protection comes at a cost. RAID 6 arrays often have slower write performance than RAID 5 arrays..

RAID 10 — Is a combination of multiple mirrored drives (RAID 1) with data stripe (RAID 0) in a single array. The RAID 10 array consists of a minimum of four hard disk drives and creates a striped set from multiple mirrored drives.

RAID 50 — also known as RAID 5+0, combines distributed parity  (RAID 5) with striping (RAID 0). It requires a minimum of six drives.

RAID 60 — also known as RAID 6+0 is a nested or “hybrid” RAID configuration that provides the distributed double parity of RAID 6 with the straight block-level striping of RAID 0. As a RAID 0 array striped across RAID 6 elements, minimal RAID 60 configuration requires 8 drives.