Which storage technology is better RAID 5 or RAID 10 or RAID 50?

RAID10 is the better choice for speed and safety.

Rais 50 is best without any condition.

If there is condition then we can design as per requirement.

Its depend upon your budget and importance of data read and write operation, mostly small organizations go with RAID 1 and 5, but If you do have good budget then 50 would be the good solution. There are some disadvantages of RAID 10 since if two of our Hard Disk fails, we will lose our data.

Hi,

Its totally depend on your design and for what type of server you want to built.

Mostly used is Raid5, if you are concerned about Data Read/Write, better to use Raid1.  

RAID 50 is my favorite RAID level. Although RAID 50 support is not in every product , I find that RAID 50 provides a great balance between storage performance, storage capacity, and data integrity that's not necessarily found in other RAID levels.

If you haven't used RAID 50 before, you're in for a treat. As one of the many multilevel RAID options that are out there, RAID 50 operates by striping (RAID 0) data across multiple RAID 5 sets 

There are three RAID 5 sets that span a total of 12 disks. Each RAID 5 set has four disks, with one disk's worth of capacity dedicated to parity information. For the example above, this means that each RAID set will lose 25% of its total capacity to parity information, as would be the case if you were to deploy a single four-disk RAID 5 set. The beauty of RAID 50 lies in the "0" part of the RAID level; this is where information is striped across each of those underlying individual RAID 5 sets.

There are a number of reasons why I like RAID 50, but there are also tradeoffs to using this RAID level. Here are some pros and cons about using RAID 50.

RAID 5 requires 1/#disks worth of space per RAID array. In Figure A, this would mean that, if all 12 disks were in a single RAID 5 set, you'd be left with 11 disks worth of capacity. With RAID 50, you need to allocate one disk per underlying array for parity, so you're left with less usable space than you would have if you simply used RAID 5.

However, if you compare RAID 50 and RAID 10, you'll see a clear winner in RAID 50 from a capacity perspective. With RAID 10, you always lose 50% of your capacity due to mirroring. Since each underlying RAID 5 array requires a minimum of three disks (RAID 5 rules), and you lose the capacity of one disk to parity, you'll never "lose" more than 33% of your total capacity when using RAID 5. As you make each RAID 5 set larger, this loss percentage goes down. In Figure A, with four disks used in each RAID 5 set, 25% of capacity is used for parity overhead; if you make that five disks per RAID 5 set, this percentage drops to 20%. As this percentage drops, your risk increases.

RAID 50 requires an array with at least six disks — two RAID 5 arrays of three disks each. I like to use three or four disk RAID 5 sets in RAID 50 arrays.

With RAID 5, as you increase the number of disks in the array, you increase the likelihood that you'll experience total array failure as more than one drive fails at the same time. As you move into RAID 50 territory, that additional disk space that you're giving up translates directly into lowered risk, as RAID 50 systems can suffer multiple disk faults — as long as those disk faults happen in the right places.

With RAID 50, if you suffer multiple disk faults in any of the underlying RAID 5 arrays, the entire RAID 50 is toast; however, each individual RAID 5 array can withstand the loss of a single disk. You never want to have more than one disk go bad at a time regardless of RAID configuration, but at least with RAID 50, your chances are much better that a second disk failure will not happen in the same array as the first failure. This is one reason that keeping the individual RAID 5 arrays small (three or four disks at most) makes a lot of sense. The more disks you add to the individual RAID 5 arrays, the higher your risk for suffering a dual disk loss in one array.

What are you trying to achieve and the number of drives you have?

• RAID 5: Better option for redundancy and utilization of space
• RAID 10: It's a RAID 1 & 0, meaning half your drives are RAID 1 and the other half is RAID 0. The RAID 1 is a mirror for the RAID 0.
• RAID 50: Its a RAID 5 & 0, meaning you have a set of RAID 0 sets, setup together as one drive, then RAIDed into a RAID 5. This has better I/O performance than regular RAID 5.

Hope this answers your question...!