RAID Level | Minimum Drives | Protection | Description | Strengths | Weaknesses |
Standard | 1 | None | Creates a single volume for one drive or several drives | Saves on costs | No data protection like proper RAID |
JBOD | 1 | None | Allows you to create a large virtual disk drive by concatenating two or more smaller drives together | Saves on costs | No redundancy and limited data protection |
RAID 0 | 2 | None | Data striping without redundancy | High performance | No data protection, one drive fails, all is lost |
RAID 1 | 2 | Single Drive Failure | Disk mirroring | High data protection | High redundancy cost because all data is duplicated, twice the storage capacity is required |
RAID 5 | 3 | Single Drive Failure | Block-level data striping with distributed parity | High data protection, support multiple simultaneous reads and writes | Write performance is slower than RAID 0 or RAID 1 |
RAID 5+Spare | 3 | Single Drive Failure | Data striping across all drives | High data protection | - |
RAID 10 | 4 | 1 Disk per Mirrored Stripe | Combination of RAID 0 (data striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring) | Highest data proection, can tolerate multiple drive failures | High redundancy cost because all data is duplicated, twice the storage capacity is required |