RAID 5

- Provides redundancy by writing data and parity information across three or more drives, thus increasing performance. The RAID Level 5 provides the best combination of disk array technology. The most popular RAID level supplied.

Advantages

• Most flexible of all disk arrays
• Best balance cost / performance / protection of any RAID system
• Allows multiple simultaneous writes
• High read data rate
• Medium write data rate
• 3 drives minimum
• Ideal for small write applications
• Highly efficient

Disadvantages

• Inefficient with large file transfer
• Disk failure has an impact on performance

Applications

• Transaction processing
• Relational Databases
• File & Print Servers
• WWW, E-mail, and News servers
• Intranet Servers