RAID level performance comparison

I'm planning to upgrade my development workstation later this year, and at the same time I'd like to implement a proper hardware RAID solution. Now, for example Wikipedia has good information about RAID, but it's difficult to find a concise table of RAID performance levels compared. Luckily, I found such a table from Adaptec's RAID controller user's guide, available here. That said, my current favorite is the Adaptec Unified Serial RAID Controller 3805, which supports up to eight drives, both SATA and SAS.

Here's the table, copied from the said user's guide:

RAID Level	Redundancy	Disk Drive Usage	Read Performance	Write Performance	Built-in Hot Spare	Minimum Disk Drives
RAID 0	No	100 %	X X X	X X X	No	2
RAID 1	Yes	50 %	X X	X X	No	2
RAID 1E	Yes	50 %	X X	X X	No	3
RAID 10	Yes	50 %	X X	X X	No	4
RAID 5	Yes	67% – 94%	X X X	X	No	3
RAID 5EE	Yes	50% – 88%	X X X	X	Yes	4
RAID 50	Yes	67% – 94%	X X X	X	No	6
RAID 6	Yes	50% – 88%	X X	X	No	4
RAID 60	Yes	50% – 88%	X X	X	No	8
Spanned Volume	No	100 %	X X X	X X X	No	2
RAID Volume	No	50% – 100%	X X X	X X X	No	4

As you can see, there are many different RAID levels nowadays, in addition to those standard RAID levels we all learned long time ago.

Keywords: RAID, performance, RAID levels compared, perfomance comparison.