What are the performance differences between Raid 0,1,5,6,10
One worthwhile location to check out is StorageReview.com's Comparison of RAID Levels
But focused on the answer:
LEVEL | CAPACITY | STORAGE | FAILURE | RDM READ | RDM WRITE | SEQ READ | SEQ WRITE | 0 | S * N | 100% | 0 | **** | **** | **** | **** | 1 | S | 50% | 1 | *** | *** | ** | *** | 5 | S * (N-1)| (N-1)/N | 1 | **** | ** | *** | *** | 6 | S * (N-2)| (N-2)/N | 2 | **** | * | *** | ** | 0+1 | S * (N/2)| 50% | 1 | **** | *** | **** | *** |
Legend:
Capacity: Size of drive
Storage: Amount of space on all drives actually useable
Failure: Number of drives that can fail
Agreed upon best answer...
I'd say it's application specific. If you're a gamer who wants to speed everything up and throw caution to the wind, RAID0 is great! You double your chances of disk failure but if your data are unimportant, who cares?
RAID1 is just the opposite; it provides an hot backup of all your data and can withstand a single disk failure, which halves the probability of data loss.
RAID5 and RAID6 are more expensive (need more disks) but have the benefit of being able to withstand disk loss while providing a handy speed increase. You halve your probability of data loss with RAID5 and quarter it with RAID6 (can withstand two lost disks and function.)
When it comes to RAID1+0 v. RAID5/6, RAID5/6 will provide a superior speed increase (due to a higher level of striping) than RAID1+0 but have the potential to slow down more in the event of a disk loss (since data has to be reconstructed from parity information.) RAID1+0, however, will not lose any speed in the event of a disk loss (since there's not much bandwidth gain from having a mirrored set.)
As far as restoring functionality from a broken set (out of 1+0, 5 and 6) 1+0 would be the easiest to do so. You would only have to copy the data from the the mirror drive to the new drive whereas with RAID5/6, all drives in the array are involved in the recreation of a lost disk's data.
Hope this helped :)