So if you have a combination of drives from, say, 2 to 8 TB, you’ll be able to use them, though the percentage of their space available will be similar to what I explain above.
Many RAID arrays let you use drives of different sizes with RAID 5 or 6. As an example, five 4 TB drives give you 8 TB storage.
RAID 10: This level offers even more data protection, but at the expense of storage. Since there is the risk with RAID 5 that one drive will fail during the restoration procedure, the extra drive redundancy you get from RAID 6 makes your data much more secure. You need at least four drives, and you only get 60% of their capacity as usable storage space (five 4 TB drives gives you 12 TB of usable storage), but two drives can fail without your losing data. RAID 6: This is similar to RAID 5, but with extra parity, or data protection. Most RAID units allow you to hot-swap a drive – change it without restarting the unit – and it automatically “rebuilds” when you do so, ensuring that the new drive takes its place in the array. For example, if you have three 4 TB drives in a unit, you’ll get 8 TB capacity with RAID 5. But you don’t get all the capacity of the drives, because of this protection. This means that the data is written in such a way so if one drive is damaged or fails, you can still recover all your data. RAID 5: This setup requires at least three drives, and uses block-level striping (as in RAID 0) and distributed parity. With two 4 TB drives, RAID 1 gives you 4 TB storage. While this should not be considered a backup, because if you accidentally delete a file from one drive the array deletes it from the other, it is a good way to ensure that you always have a second copy of your data ready to use. You’ll be able to read and write to the second disk, and replace the failed disk to maintain data security. This provides drive redundancy, ensuring that if one disk fails, your second disk is available. RAID 1: This uses “data mirroring,” where all the data written to the array is written to two disks simultaneously. You would choose this RAID level if you need speed, but RAID 0 offers no extra data protection. Since both disks are spinning simultaneously, the data can be written much faster than to a single disk. As a gross simplification, think that the odd numbered blocks of data are written to the first disk and the even numbered blocks to the second disk. RAID 0: This uses a pair of disks set up with “striping,” where data is written to two disks alternately. There are many RAID levels, but the main ones to consider are the following: With some devices, and with some RAID levels, you may be able to change this later, but it could take a long time to do so, because you’d have to copy all your data to another drive first. When setting up a RAID array, you choose which RAID level you want to use this is akin to formatting a drive. 
Network-attached storage (NAS) devices can also be RAID arrays, and large data systems, such as object storage, use a similar though more sophisticated technology. You can get large devices that hold five drives, from Drobo and LaCie, which are often Mac-ready out of the box, as well as smaller two-drive devices (for RAID levels 0 and 1 see below) from a variety of vendors. However, there are also some disadvantages to RAID, so it’s important to understand what happens when you copy data to a RAID array. There are a number of RAID levels, each of which offers different advantages. RAID stands for “redundant array of independent disks,” which is a way of storing data on multiple drives. This article covers how RAID storage works, and also I’ll discuss whether you should use RAID devices for your data and for your backups. But you may be wondering a few things, such as what the heck is RAID? Is it a backup in and of itself? And should you use RAID for data storage and backups? These are all good questions that I’ll clear up, making the complex easier to understand, so you can decide if RAID is right for you. This is a type of storage that offers a number of advantages, including faster speed, better data security, or a combination of both.
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How To Understanding RAID for Data Storage and Backupsįollowing my article about 4 Types of Backup Hard Drives for Mac, several readers asked about RAID storage.
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