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💻 Tech & Computing

RAID Storage Capacity Calculator

Calculate usable storage capacity, parity overhead, and fault tolerance for RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 configurations.

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RAID: Redundant Array of Independent Disks

RAID is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drives into one logical unit to improve performance, redundancy, or both. Each RAID level makes a different tradeoff between usable capacity, speed, and fault tolerance.

RAID Level Comparison

RAID 0 (Striping): 100% efficiency. No redundancy. All drives contribute to usable space. Single drive failure = total data loss.

RAID 1 (Mirroring): 50% efficiency. Data is mirrored to all drives. Can survive all-but-one drive failing.

RAID 5 (Parity): (N-1)/N efficiency. Parity distributed across all drives. Survives 1 drive failure. Requires min. 3 drives.

RAID 6 (Double Parity): (N-2)/N efficiency. Two parity blocks. Survives 2 simultaneous drive failures. Requires min. 4 drives.

RAID 10 (Mirror + Stripe): 50% efficiency. Minimum 4 drives. Best performance + redundancy combination.

How RAID 5 Parity Works

In RAID 5, every write operation calculates a parity value using an XOR operation across the data blocks. This parity block is rotated across all drives. If one drive fails, the missing data can be reconstructed from the remaining drives' data and the parity — this is RAID 5's core resilience mechanism.