Alright, so choosing the right RAID level is really going to depend on what is most important for you and the application you're going to be using. There are five main things that you should consider when choosing your RAID levels. Those are storage efficiency, performance, data redundancy, the rebuild factor, and finally the cost-effectiveness.

So the main thing to remember here is that there is always going to be some form of trade-off between these five things that I mentioned. I suggest checking out the link in the description below to find out more. So I'm not going to go too in depth on the different types of RAID in this video, but what I am going to do is give some general guidelines and information on the different RAID’s. So if you're looking for the best storage efficiency and speed, but losing data isn't a worry because the data on the array is already backed up, then there's nothing faster than a RAID0, giving you nearly 100% of your raw data storage by striping bits of data across all drives in the array. So this might be a great option for you video editors out there for a working or scratch drive, but I would never recommend going larger than 2 or 3 drives in a RAID0.

If redundancy is important and you have a need for high theoretical read performance, then you may want to take a look at a RAID10. So a RAID10 is considered faster than a RAID60, however if you lose two drives from the same mirror, then you've got a failed RAID in your hands, whereas a RAID60 can handle two failed drives from the same array.

Now this is where the trade-offs between those five different things I mentioned earlier really come into play. If storage efficiency is most important and packing the server as full as possible is your main priority, then you most likely might want to use a RAID60 with no more than three arrays in the stripe. One thing to remember is that no matter what type of RAID you end up using, no matter how much redundancy it has, that it is not a suitable backup. If your software or OS ends up corrupting the data on your RAID, it may spread throughout the entire array. This may make your data impossible to recover, so a proper backup is always going to be a separate copy of your data, preferably on a different location.

So this was just a quick summary of RAID configurations and which one we may recommend based on your application and storage requirements. We go into much greater detail on our blog post and knowledge base articles, and those links can be found in the description below. So, thanks for checking back in with us guys for our weekly tech video, if you have any questions or comments, be sure to leave them down below, and we'll see you next week for another tech video.