RAID 5 vs RAIDZ1 — 8×12 TB

You have 8 drives of 12 TB (96 TB raw) and are deciding between RAID 5 (single parity — one drive may fail) and RAIDZ1 (ZFS single parity with checksums). The table shows what each choice actually gives you.

MetricRAID 5RAIDZ1
Usable capacity84 TB84 TB
Redundancy overhead12 TB12 TB
Storage efficiency88%88%
Fault tolerance (drives)11
Minimum drives33

Both give the same usable capacity on this configuration — the decision is about failure behavior, not space.

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

See it live

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

Open in RAID Calculator →Not sure? Take the RAID wizard →
More comparisons
RAID 5 vs RAID 64× 4 TB · 12 vs 8 TBRAID 5 vs RAID 64× 8 TB · 24 vs 16 TBRAID 5 vs RAID 64× 12 TB · 36 vs 24 TBRAID 5 vs RAID 66× 8 TB · 40 vs 32 TBRAID 5 vs RAID 68× 8 TB · 56 vs 48 TBRAID 5 vs RAID 104× 8 TB · 24 vs 16 TBRAID 6 vs RAID 108× 8 TB · 48 vs 32 TBRAID 6 vs RAID 104× 12 TB · 24 vs 24 TB