RAID 5 vs RAID 10

RAID is a technology which allows your data to be stored across multiple hard drives, allowing the operating system to use the drives as though they were one larger disk. In addition to allowing larger storage capacity, this allows data redundancy and improved performance. There are different RAID levels, which provide differing levels of redundancy, performance and storage capacity.

We offer a choice of either RAID 5 or RAID 10 — RAID 10 offers better performance and better redundancy, but with a lower total capacity than RAID 5 with the same number of disks. Specifically, for a server with N drives of capacity S, the total capacity of RAID 5 equals (N−1)×S, whereas with RAID 10 it’s N×S÷2.

With RAID 5, any one disk can fail and it will still operate (though performance will take a huge hit), but if more than one drive fails then it will stop operating and data will be lost. With RAID 10, drives are paired and any number of drives can fail with no data loss and without any performance hit as long as no two drives in the same pair fail.

We recommend RAID 10 due to its superior tolerance against disk failure; however, if you’d rather have the extra storage space then you’re free to choose RAID 5 instead.