RAID 5 vs RAID 6: which parity scheme should your array use?

The parity array trade-off that gets more important as drive capacities grow.

RAID 5 uses one parity drive and tolerates one drive failure; RAID 6 uses two parity drives and tolerates two. In a 4-drive 8 TB array, RAID 5 gives you 24 TB usable and survives one failure, RAID 6 gives you 16 TB usable and survives two. The choice used to be mostly about capacity efficiency; with drives over 10 TB becoming mainstream, it's increasingly about rebuild-time safety.

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Option A

RAID 5

Wins 3 of 11 compared specs

Option B

RAID 6

Wins 3 of 11 compared specs

Side-by-side specs

Spec	RAID 5	RAID 6
Parity drives	1	2
Drives tolerated lost	1	2 (better on this spec)
Usable capacity (4 × 8 TB)	24 TB (better on this spec)	16 TB
Usable capacity (8 × 8 TB)	56 TB (better on this spec)	48 TB
Efficiency (N drives)	(N-1)/N	(N-2)/N
Min drives required	3	4
Write overhead	~1.25× baseline (better on this spec)	~1.5-1.75× baseline
Read performance	Fast	Fast
URE risk during rebuild	Significant at 10TB+	Survivable (better on this spec)
Safe for 10TB+ drives	Risky	Yes (better on this spec)
Typical use	3-4 bay NAS	5+ bay NAS / servers

How they differ

The key number is unrecoverable read error (URE) rate. Consumer hard drives spec around 1 URE per 10^14 bits — roughly one read error per 12.5 TB read. On a RAID 5 rebuild of a failed 20 TB drive, the array must successfully read every bit of every other drive to reconstruct the missing data. With six 20 TB drives left, that's 100 TB to read, and the probability of hitting at least one URE during the rebuild is non-trivial (often cited at 25-50% for large consumer-drive arrays). A URE during RAID 5 rebuild means total data loss. RAID 6 survives a URE during rebuild because it still has a second parity block to reconstruct from — you only lose data if a second drive fails completely while rebuilding. Write performance is the other trade: RAID 6's two-parity overhead means writes are 15-25% slower than RAID 5 on the same hardware.

Verdict

RAID 6 is the correct default for any array with four or more drives over 8 TB each. RAID 5 remains fine for small arrays (3-4 drives) with sub-4 TB disks, particularly on enterprise drives with 10^15 URE rates. Beyond those limits, the rebuild-failure risk of RAID 5 makes RAID 6 the safer, mandatory-for-large-arrays choice — even at the capacity cost.

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Which should you pick?

Choose RAID 5

Pick RAID 5 for 3-4 drive arrays under 20 TB total capacity, especially with enterprise drives rated at 10^15 URE or better. Acceptable for secondary / non-critical data when combined with a real backup.

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Choose RAID 6

Pick RAID 6 for any array of 5+ drives, any array using drives 10 TB or larger, and any array holding irreplaceable data. The capacity loss is worth the double-fault tolerance.

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