Back to Catalog

RAID Level Visualizer

House of Forge - Understanding Redundant Array of Independent Disks

Visual Diagrams
Comparison Table
Capacity Calculator
Failure Simulation
Quiz Mode

RAID Level Comparison

RAID Level Min Drives Usable Capacity Fault Tolerance Read Performance Write Performance Best Use Cases
RAID 0 2 100% (n × size) None Excellent Excellent Video editing, temp files, non-critical high-speed storage
RAID 1 2 50% (size of 1 drive) n-1 drives Good Fair OS drives, critical small databases, boot drives
RAID 5 3 (n-1) × size 1 drive Very Good Good File servers, general storage, application servers
RAID 6 4 (n-2) × size 2 drives Very Good Fair Large capacity arrays, archival storage, mission-critical data
RAID 10 4 50% (n/2 × size) 1 per mirror Excellent Very Good Databases, high-traffic servers, transactional systems
Key Insights:
• RAID 0 offers maximum performance but zero redundancy - any drive failure means total data loss
• RAID 1 provides simple mirroring with excellent reliability but 50% capacity overhead
• RAID 5 balances capacity, performance, and redundancy - most popular for general use
• RAID 6 adds extra parity for higher reliability in large arrays with slow rebuild times
• RAID 10 combines mirroring and striping for best performance with redundancy

RAID Capacity Calculator

Calculate usable storage capacity for different RAID configurations

Drive Failure Simulation

Click on drives to simulate failures and see how different RAID levels handle them

RAID Knowledge Quiz

Score: 0 / 0