RAID3
- Min 3 drives to implement
- Very high read and write performance
- Single disk failures do not noticeably affect performance
- An efficient setup as all parity is stored on a single disk
- With this setup, data is split onto multiple disks (much like RAID0) and parity is written to a dedicated drive
RAID 4
- Min 3 drives to implemnent
- Very high read performance, write performance not so great
- An efficient setup as all parity is stored on a single disk
- Similar to RAID3, parity is stored on a dedicated drive however parity is generated from the blocks rather than the stripes
RAID5
- Min 3 drives to implement
- Drives are all striped as per RAID0 and parity is split into each drive such that any given drive does not store parity for itself
- Extremely high read performance, above average write performance
- Since the parity is stored on the drives, the more drives, the more efficient
- Probably the best all-around RAID setup
RAID6
- Same as RAID5 except instead of a single parity entry, there are two parity entries written to each drive which gives the array the ability to handle multiple simultaneous drive failures
- Requires min 3 drives to setup (N+2)
- Extremely redundnat
Id probably reccomennd you hunt down a RAID5 card as you probably wont find controllers for the others as they are mostly for SCSI setups. Hope that clears up some things
