What is the fastest and safest RAID combination for SATA drives?

It also depends upon the number of drives : with 4 drives, go for RAID-10. With more than 8 drives, RAID-6 will probably be fast enough with a good RAID controller (3Ware, Areca, Intel 52xxx series). Here are the numbers :

• 4 x 1TB, RAID 10 : 2TB available space, 180 MB/s write, 190 MB/s read
• 8 x 1TB, RAID 10 : 4TB available space, 360 MB/s write, 400 MBs read
• 8 x 1TB, RAID-5 (dangerous): 7 TB available, 420 MB/s write, 440 MB/s read (3Ware)
• 8 x 1TB, RAID-6 : 6 TB available, 240 MB/s write, 360 MB/s read (3Ware)
• 16 x 1TB, RAID-6 : 14TB available, 280 MB/s write, 700 MB/s read (3Ware)

As you can see, with about 8 drives RAID 5 and RAID 6 are quite competitive in sequential performance with RAID-10 (not so with a shitty card such as Promise, etc). Write performance is quite limited in RAID-6, though tolerable given enough drives.

With big drives, RAID-5 is relatively unsafe because of the long time (3 to 4 hours, up to 7 to 8 hours) necessary for rebuilding. You may go to RAID-5 with 6 or 8 drives though, but you must stop all write operations in case of a drive failure until the array is rebuilt. This way it's "safe enough".

Also, don't use desktop drives in a RAID array with more than 4 drives. Vibrations and read errors will kill performance.

There pretty much is nothing better than RAID 10 for speed. Point - because you get write decoupling. Any more efficient RAID (5, 6) has a bottleneck in writing that is higher than RAID 10.

That said, you MAY get away replacing a RAID 10 normal dsics with a RAID 5 or RAID 6 based on SSD's - which may not be that much more expensive thanks to the need to have less discs.

Raid 5 gets unsafe with too large / too many discs - in this case you need to go Raid 6. Problem is that if a disc fails in Raid 5.... at a certain point you are more or less likely to get a second disc failure DURING THE REBUILD, at which point the Raid fails. The limit is currently seen around 2gb discs, so more relevant for archive setups. Raid 6 solves that for now.

Personally I currently go Raid 5/6 for storage, file servers. Raid 10 for virthal server operating system discs (but then I ahve like 6-10 platters and run 40 or so servers off that - if they all boot, that is pretty much disc hell) an RAID 10 for some database data areas.

Another thing to look at is the discs you use. higher IOPS are better. Cheap would be normal SATA discs, high end are 15000 RPM SAS discs that cost a fortune. The Western Digical Velociraptor 2.5" enterprise version is a good medium ground - 300gb per disc, 10000RPM. About double the IO of a standard SATA disc, but a LOT cheaper than SAS high end discs. But then, a RAID 5 of SSD's soonish kills those in performance AND price... because you need less.

As andol said, it all depends on your needs. What you try to do?

And finally - this is not SATA depending at all. Actualy thanks to SAS interoperability with SATA you can plug any SATA drive into a SAS backbone (they are compatible - even physically) and use the SAS infrastructure.