Hands On: Raid performance explained

Pros and cons of Raid types
Raid 0 is fast and gives you the full capacity of all your disks, but it has no fault tolerance. It’s best suited only for non-critical applications.

Raid 1 effectively performs like a single disk in speed and capacity, but the second disk delivers redundancy.

Raid 5 also offers fault tolerance, but makes more efficient use of the space available and offers read performance somewhere between Raid 0 and 1.

On the downside the distribution of parity bits takes its toll on write performance.

If you have three or more identical disks, Raid 5 is a good option for a server that needs protection against disk failure and is predominantly used for delivering data.

Raid 5 could be ideal for a media server although the recording of new TV shows would probably have to take place on a quicker system.