A technician is configuring a server with eight available drive bays. The technician wants a combination of the most redundancy and the maximum available storage. Which of the following RAID levels should the technician use?
Correct Answer: D
When selecting a RAID level, both redundancy and storage efficiency must be considered:
* RAID 1 mirrors data, providing high redundancy but reducing available storage to 50%. With eight drives, only four drives' worth of space would be available.
* RAID 5 uses striping with distributed parity. It provides good storage efficiency (n-1) but can only tolerate one drive failure.
* RAID 6 is similar to RAID 5 but uses dual parity, allowing two drives to fail while still maintaining data integrity. However, it reduces available storage to (n-2).
* RAID 10 (also known as RAID 1+0) combines mirroring and striping. It provides excellent redundancy and performance, allowing multiple drive failures as long as they aren't in the same mirrored pair.
Storage efficiency is 50%, but the redundancy and performance benefits outweigh this trade-off in high- availability environments.
Since the technician requires both maximum redundancy and high available storage, RAID 10 is the best choice.
Reference: CompTIA Server+ SK0-005 Official Textbook, Chapter 5 - Storage Solutions and RAID