RAID 5 requires a minimum of how many hard drives?

The correct answer is C. 3. RAID 5 uses block-level striping with distributed parity. Parity information is spread across all drives rather than dedicated to one drive. To calculate parity and distribute it meaningfully across the array, RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 drives. With 3 drives, 2 drives hold…

Hardware

Question

Options

How the community answered

(47 responses)

A
2% (1)
B
6% (3)
C
89% (42)
D
2% (1)

Explanation

RAID 5 uses block-level striping with distributed parity. Parity information is spread across all drives rather than dedicated to one drive. To calculate parity and distribute it meaningfully across the array, RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 drives. With 3 drives, 2 drives hold data stripes and 1 drive's worth of space is used for parity (spread across all three). This allows recovery if any single drive fails. RAID 1 requires 2 drives; RAID 6 and RAID 10 require 4 drives minimum.

Topics

#RAID 5#RAID configuration#storage redundancy#parity

Community Discussion

No community discussion yet for this question.

Full 220-801 Practice