RAID 5 vs RAID 10 — 4×8 TB

You have 4 drives of 8 TB (32 TB raw) and are deciding between RAID 5 (single parity — one drive may fail) and RAID 10 (striped mirrors — fast, one failure per mirror pair). The table shows what each choice actually gives you.

MetricRAID 5RAID 10
Usable capacity24 TB16 TB
Redundancy overhead8 TB16 TB
Storage efficiency75%50%
Fault tolerance (drives)11+
Minimum drives34

RAID 5 gives you 8 TB more usable space on this configuration.

With drives of 8 TB and larger, single-parity rebuilds carry measurable URE risk — check yours in the rebuild calculator.

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Open this exact configuration in the calculator and tweak drives, sizes and levels freely.

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