ProMAX Pro Video Resources

What is better RAID 5 or RAID 6?

Written by Nathaniel Cooper | Oct 14, 2019 7:18:31 PM

RAID5 tends to offer the fastest read and write performance, while maintaining a fairly strong raw to usable data percentage.  Usually ranging from 85-90% raw to usable.

 

RAID6 offers great read and write performance, and depending on your RAID controller, buffering and settings performance can be close to RAID5.  In some cases even beyond a RAID5.  However raw to usable capacity is slightly lower ranging from 75%-85%.

 

RAID5 allows for a single drive to fail without any data loss.  RAID6 allows for two drive failures without any data loss.

 

RAID5 rebuild times tend to be quite a bit faster, ranging from 50% to 200% faster, depending on capacity, RAID controller and the amount of data you have.

 

Neither is better or worse, but in generally RAID5 will give you a little more storage, performance and faster rebuilds and RAID6 will give you more data protection.

 

My personal favorite set up is a SSD based RAID6, it's maximizes performance, rebuild times and data protection.