Has RAID5 had it’s day?

I’m noticing a slow but consistent change in people’s attitudes towards RAID types lately. It mostly has to do with the price and size of SATA disks. It seems that RAID5 is just not considered necessary, relevant or even suitable these days.

In days gone by RAID10 was always available, but considered way too expensive for anyone but the database boffins who were only interested in perforance at all costs. RAID5 made a lot of sense in servers where a mix of capacity and performance were paramount (especially in the fileserver market).

However it seems that with the advent of large SATA disks the requirement for RAID5’s better utilisation of disk capacity is not such an important issue, and that customers are willing to put together larger RAID10 configurations to meet their capacty requirements.

I personally tend to agree because of the general all-round performance benefits of running RAID10 over RAID5, but I’m interested in what you are doing out at the coalface. Are you still living with RAID5 (and loving it), or has it gone the way of the dodo? (Small caveat here … I’m investigating the performance benefits of SQL on RAID 5 at the moment so might have some different opinions in the future.)

Love to hear your thoughts on this one?

Ciao
Neil