How to select the best RAID configuration for your application

How to select the best RAID configuration for your application

RAID systems are popular with companies, small businesses and private individuals to protect valuable data from storage media failures, among other benefits. RAID technology combines several smaller hard disk drives (HDD) into one larger storage space with some redundancy like parity or mirroring of data, so that if a drive is failing, the data can be restored from the remaining drives after the failing drive is replaced.

But different configurations have diverse characteristics in terms of storage efficiency, RAID rebuild times and performance in degraded (disk-failure) condition, and whilst being rebuilt. So, what is the best RAID configuration for NAS, USB-RAID box, RAID controller, or software defined storage? Which specifications are helpful and how much influence has the individual use case on selection?

Based on extensive testing of the most common RAID configurations at the Toshiba HDD Laboratory, What is the best RAID configuration for 4 drives? explains the methodology applied by the Toshiba experts, shares the detailed test results, and provides recommendations based on the outcomes for sequential, random/mixed and economic use cases.

For new insights and top tips concerning RAID configuration, download the whitepaper here:

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