🧮 RAID 5 is a popular storage configuration that strikes a balance between performance, capacity, and fault tolerance. It’s like the Swiss Army knife of RAID setups—versatile and efficient.

⚙️ How RAID 5 Works

• Striping with distributed parity: Data is split into blocks and spread across all drives, with parity (error-checking info) also distributed.
• Minimum of 3 drives: You need at least three disks to implement RAID 5.
• Parity magic: If one drive fails, the system can reconstruct the lost data using parity and the remaining drives.

📈 Benefits

• Fault tolerance: Can survive the failure of one disk without data loss.
• Efficient storage: Only one disk’s worth of space is used for parity, so you get more usable capacity than RAID 1.
• Good read performance: Reads are fast since data is striped across multiple drives.

⚠️ Drawbacks

• Write performance hit: Calculating and writing parity slows things down compared to RAID 0.
• Rebuild time: If a disk fails, rebuilding can be slow and stressful on the remaining drives.
• Not ideal for heavy write workloads: Better suited for read-heavy environments.

🧪 Ideal Use Cases

• File servers
• Backup systems
• Archival storage
• Small to medium business environments