2023-10-22, 01:26 PM
You may lose storage space, but your choices are maximum space with zero redundancy or less space and able to survive a failed drive. Hard drives do fail, sometimes with zero warning, so having the ability to survive drive failures is well worth the "lost" space. The best trade-off in terms of space not available for data is RAID5 or RAID6; RAID5 (minimum of 3 equally-sized drives) can survive the loss of any single disk, RAID6 (minimum of 4 equally-sized drives) can survive the loss of any two disks and rebuilding the array after a failed disk is less error-prone.