Selecting the right type of RAID storage depends on knowing how you’ll use it and what benefits you’re looking to unlock. There are a wide variety of different RAID types, with options such as RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10 being the most common. However, there are others that can be a good fit for more experienced users, depending on your particular workflow and the environment in which you’re using your RAID system.

For example, if you’re looking for RAID configurations that can boost your system performance, check out some of these solutions. If you’re interested in improving data redundancy and your overall storage fault tolerance, take a look here. And, if you’re interested in striking the right balance of both, keep reading here.

JBOD, which stands for Just a Bunch of Disks, and JBOF, which stands for Just a Bunch of Flash, are configurations of hard drives and SSDs in which multiple drives are consolidated within a single device, but each drive acts independently of the others.

Essentially, each disk is its own logical volume, although the system identifies them as if they were separate external drives. This adds critical flexibility for certain scenarios, either using drives of different capacities, or adding drives later on without required reformatting.

However, it’s worth noting that JBOD and JBOF don’t deliver additional performance or redundancy.

With Spanning, the multiple drives of a JBOD setup are combined into one logical volume on your system. In the read/write process, this means that your files fill one drive, then the next, and then the next after that, and so on.

It’s similar to RAID 0 in that you get the greatest possible capacity in a single volume. However, because the data is not broken up or striped, failure occurs at the level of individual drives rather than across the entire array.

Also note that Spanning does not confer any performance boost.

Yes. It may seem like the RAID type numbers are random, but other RAID types exist. We don't discuss them above, nor do you readily find devices that support them, because generally they've either been replaced by the RAID types you find explained here, or fit very specific, niche uses. You may also see ones with an "E" added or other letters; these may represent variations of existing types that are more complex and/or proprietary. If you want to learn more about these, we recommend that you refer to product information on a device that supports them.

RAID 50 and 60 are very similar to RAID 10, as they are all "nested" RAIDs. The first number in the type — 5 and 6, respectively — represents what subset they are built with, either RAID 5 arrays or RAID 6 arrays. The second number represents the RAID type the first one is "nested" into; in this case, it's RAID 0.

Let's dive a bit deeper.

So, with RAID 50:

• Two RAID 5 subsets stripe across each other in RAID 0. 
• With eight drives, four drives act as RAID 5 with their own parity. Another four do the same with data split between two sets. 
• Any one of the four drives in each set could fail. That's one to two drives — two if they're not within the same subset.

So, with RAID 60:

• Two RAID 6 subsets stripe across each other in RAID 0.
• With eight drives, any one of the four drives in each set could fail. That's two to four drives — four if two are from one subset and two are from the other subset.

RAID 50 vs. RAID 60:

• RAID 50 will have faster performance than RAID 60.
• RAID 60, like RAID 6, has parity for all data written twice. That's why you "lose" two disks of capacity per RAID 6 subset.
• With RAID 50, it's one disk per subset.

Nested RAID types provide subtle differences to the standard RAID types to allow for better performance and/or potentially higher fault tolerance. Note, however, that they generally require more disks.