Minimum is three for a Raid5

So with the 3 disks, with only a single disk failure in any of the 3 the system should maintain operation with only degraded disk performance?

What about an online spare?  What would it's purpose serve in this scenario?

Thanks for your reply....

Online spare would reconfigure the RAID and mark the drive that has problems as bad..

One thing to keep in mind is the math involved in a RAID (if you didn't already know).  For a 3 disk RAID you lose the equivalent of one disk in a RAID 5 for the striping and parity..

Hi,

This document may help explaining some of the raid theory:

http://docs.us.dell.com/docs/storage/Raid/RAIDbk0.pdf

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