Which of the following best describes the characteristics of a standard RAID 5 array?
Requires at least three drives and mirrors every drive to every other drive, giving maximum redundancy with significantly reduced usable capacity.
Requires at least two drives, stripes data without parity, offers no fault tolerance and is used purely for speed improvements.
Requires at least four drives, mirrors pairs of disks and stripes the mirrors, providing very high read and write performance and fault tolerance for up to two simultaneous drive failures.
Requires at least three drives, stripes data with distributed parity, provides fault tolerance for one drive failure, offers faster reads but incurs a parity write penalty compared with RAID 0.
RAID 5 stripes user data across all member drives and stores parity information that is also distributed across those drives. Because at least three disks are needed to hold both data and parity blocks, RAID 5 can survive the loss of any one drive (fault tolerance). The striping improves aggregate read throughput, but every write must also update parity, creating a performance penalty compared with RAID 0 or a single disk. The remaining answer choices describe other RAID levels (striped-only RAID 0, nested RAID 10, and fully mirrored RAID 1 configurations) and therefore do not match RAID 5.
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