A technician is setting up a server with a RAID 1 array for the boot partition and a RAID 5 array for the data partition. Which of the following is the MINIMUM number of disks needed to implement…

4 disks is insufficient because RAID 1 consumes 2 disks and RAID 5 requires at least 3 disks separately, totaling a minimum of 5.

RAID 1 mirrors data across exactly 2 disks, while RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 disks to distribute data with distributed parity, providing fault tolerance against a single disk failure. Because the boot partition RAID 1 array and the data partition RAID 5 array use separate, independent disk sets, the minimum combined total is 2 + 3 = 5 disks. Using fewer disks would prevent one or both arrays from being correctly configured.

6 disks exceeds the minimum because RAID 5 only requires 3 disks, not 4, making the combined minimum 5 rather than 6.

7 disks far exceeds the minimum required for a RAID 1 plus RAID 5 configuration.