I highly recommend looking into zfs and raidz 2 or z 3 , as zfs as a file system is designed to resolve most of the problems software raid has , and gives performance of hardware raid , however at a sometimes MUCH higher memory and somewhat higher CPU cost . This isn ' t a problem in most dedicated storage machines and only becomes one when a machine is multi purpose . At home I ' ve got a personal server with a two zfs pools running right now I really need to reengineer it , it grew very much organically over the last ~ 5 years , was originally Solaris then I migrated for FreeBSDFreeNAS . One has 3 drives for storage , 2 TB each , Z 1 , for a total of 4 TB usable currently holding about 9 TB of data with compression and deduplication . The other pool has 4 x 4 TB drives for 12 usable , again z 1 , currently holding about 7 TB , and showing about 6 TB free same reasons . In addition , there is one SSD acting as read and write cache , resolving all the risk of data loss , as data is written to it for storage until written to the spinning drives , that way there is SSD level write performance and plenty of time for the writes to the magnetic disks to happen and be verified . This setup once had a simultaneous four drive failure , turns out that the Segate Baracuda Greens I had used at one point had a firmware bug where they would drop out at a specific rollover point in their poweron hours SMART count , all four drives were dead within 15 m of eachother . With a firmware flash using a development firmware I got from the company , I managed to get them all up , and get the data off , then I swapped those four drives for a mix of different makesmodels to reduce the risk of something like that happening again . Performance wise , I fully saturate my gige NIC on any client in my house , the server has a bonded quad port gig nic , so even when pulling a steady ~ 120 MBs to two or three machines at once , my VMs running on my ESXi server don ' t see any hiccup at all the ESXi server is completely diskless , everything is on the file server , including the boot drive , served over iSCSI .