Understanding RAID Concepts and Levels
www.3ware.com
13
Drive Capacity Considerations
The capacity of each drive is limited to the capacity of the smallest drive in
the array. The total array capacity is defined as follows:
Table 3: Drive Capacity
RAID Level
Capacity
RAID 0
(number of drives) X (capacity of the smallest drive)
RAID 1
capacity of the smallest drive
RAID 5
(number of drives - 1) X (capacity of the smallest drive)
Storage efficiency increases with the number of disks:
storage efficiency = (number of drives -1) / (number of drives)
RAID 10
(number of drives / 2) X (capacity of smallest drive)
RAID 50
(number of drives - number of groups of drives) X (capacity of the
smallest drive)