What RAID level provides high availability while keeping storage capacity efficient?

RAID 5 is a RAID level that balances high availability and efficient use of storage capacity. It does this by using block-level striping with distributed parity. In RAID 5, data is spread across multiple disks, and parity information is stored alongside the data. This allows the array to withstand the failure of one disk without losing any data. When a disk fails, the system can continue to operate normally and use the parity information to reconstruct the lost data on the fly.

One of the significant advantages of RAID 5 is that it provides fault tolerance while only requiring the equivalent capacity of one additional disk for parity, making it more storage-efficient than other configurations that might require a larger proportion of the total storage for redundancy. This efficiency is especially valuable in environments where maximizing available storage space is crucial, while still requiring data protection.

In contrast, RAID 0 offers no redundancy, making it unsuitable for environments where high availability is necessary. RAID 1, which mirrors data across two disks, provides redundancy but uses 50% of the total storage capacity purely for mirroring. RAID 10 combines RAID 1 and RAID 0 by striping data across mirrored sets but also requires a significant amount of additional storage for redundancy, leading to lower overall capacity utilization