RAID 0 is the technique of striping which means the drive's storage space is divided into strips or blocks. Data is divided onto multiple disk drives in this manner in order to speed up the reading and writing process due to the multiple disks ability to carry these functions out simultaneously. RAID 0 is used for increased performance, it is not fault tolerant and does not perform redundancy of data.

RAID 1 is the technique of disk mirroring and involves at least 2 drives that duplicate the storage of data; no striping is involved. Either disk can be read at the same time but only written at the same rate as a single disk. The 100% redundancy of data offers the highest level of protection incase of a disk failure however, the storage cost is doubled.

RAID 5 is implemented as a combination of data stripping with parity, where data and parity blocks are written successively across the drives of the array. RAID 5 is used mainly to ensure data integrity. This RAID level requires a minimum of three drives.

RAID 10 employs both mirroring and stripping and may be implemented as a stripped array which is then mirrored, or a mirrored array which is then stripped. Regardless of the implementation, this RAID level takes a minimum of four drives. Please note: the effective disk availability, under this RAID arrangement, is half of the physical disk space.