RAID 5 question

[wizang]

I had a couple questions about RAID 5... I understand that to be redundant enough to be able to lose 1 drive each HDD has a section devoted to parity information. So for example in a 3 drive array, is the total usable space then the total size of the array minus 1/3 the total? Also, in a perfect world, is the performance of RAID 5 comparable to striping with just the cost of some space, or is there a ton of overhead?

 

[Dangman]

An easier way to determine how much storage you'll get from a RAID 5 array, use this formula:
S x (N-1) where S is the size of the smallest drive in the array and N is the number of drives in the array.