So I am switching from a MyBook Live Duo to a 4 Bay QNap Nas drive with four 2TB drives for a total of 8TBs. I've only ever had experience with a RAID 1 configuration, and now I'm using a RAID 5 configuration. Can someone please explain how I have over 5 TBs of available space. My understanding is RAID 5 is more secure, but in a RAID 1 configuration I only have access to half of the total space. Why does RAID 5 give me more?
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RAID 5 Newbie
- Thread starter cwazytech
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Raid 5 uses one drive for parity, so you should get the majority of the other drives' usable space for storage. The formula for space is:
(Number of Drives - 1) * Size of smallest drive = Approx. usable storage.
In your case: (4 - 1) * 2 = ~6TB of usable space.
Here is a good link to read about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_5