RAID 5 vs RAID 6: Which One Is Actually Safe in 2025?
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Parity RAID is still one of the best ways to balance cost, performance, and redundancy. But the real question in 2025 isn’t how RAID works, it’s whether RAID 5 is still safe or if RAID 6 should be the new default.
Our latest article by Vladyslav Savchenko for StarWind explains how rebuild times, URE risk, and drive size impact reliability, so you know when single parity is fine and when dual parity is essential. Read more here: https://starwind.com/s/xj -
@Oksana said in RAID 5 vs RAID 6: Which One Is Actually Safe in 2025?:
Parity RAID is still one of the best ways to balance cost, performance, and redundancy. But the real question in 2025 isn’t how RAID works, it’s whether RAID 5 is still safe or if RAID 6 should be the new default.
Our latest article by Vladyslav Savchenko for StarWind explains how rebuild times, URE risk, and drive size impact reliability, so you know when single parity is fine and when dual parity is essential. Read more here: https://starwind.com/s/xj@scottalanmiller You might want to chime in here.
We've covered the issues with parity RAIDs on old style HDD here so much. No where in the article did I see mention of the glaring differences between HDD and SSD/NVMe.
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All my vendors recommend to avoid RAID all together, so we don't use it on the servers where I work.
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@dave247 said in RAID 5 vs RAID 6: Which One Is Actually Safe in 2025?:
All my vendors recommend to avoid RAID all together, so we don't use it on the servers where I work.
Even I rarely use it. With good backups, rapid rebuilds, and highly reliable NVMe, RAID has become a very special use case.
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Given how big disks have become, many admins are moving away from RAID 5. Now they are seeing the value of RAID 6. For example, RAID 6 (still reliable for most enterprise/NAS setups). Erasure Coding (Ceph, TrueNAS Scale) → more scalable fault tolerance. RAID 5 is effectively obsolete for any array using today’s large disks.
