Hai Boys

[Samoht]

Originally Posted by Klendathu [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If you only have three drives available and you need at least some level of redundancy, RAID 5 is the way to go. With how inexpensive disks have become, it is a bit more logical to add at least one more drive and go RAID 10. But sometimes you only have 3 drives.

Just saying.

well it depends on a few more factors than just number of drives. software raid or hardware controller? what kind of uptime do you need? what is the size of the raid?

if you're actually limited to 3 drives, nowadays you could realistically put the drives into a raid 0 and back up to cloud/colo and not give a crap. you'd still have redundancy, but you'd be working off of remote copies for a few hours if you lost your local.

and raid6 is the answer for 4 drives. it's same drive count as a raid5 with a hotspare. same capacity, too, with better read performance, but sometimes worse write performance if you're running software raid or have bad cache/controller. you'd have the redundancy for two concurrent failures, something a raid10 or a raid5 with a hotspare can't guarantee.