TheBinary Report
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Infrastructure planning tool

RAID & Data
Protection.

Compare usable capacity, overhead, fault tolerance, and implementation assumptions across standard RAID, erasure coding, and vendor-specific layouts.

01

Drive inventory

Use the vendor’s advertised decimal capacity for an apples-to-apples comparison.

02

Protection model

Select the architecture that matches the product being planned. Vendor modes expose their own assumptions.

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Read the estimate

Protection has
a cost.

Capacity is a planning estimate for equal-size drives. It excludes filesystem overhead, snapshots, metadata, thin-provisioning behavior, controller reserves, system partitions, and any product-specific capacity guarantee.

In standard RAID, the model uses a single protection set. The NetApp modes reserve the specified spares and apply double or triple parity across the planned RAID-group width. IBM DRAID modes reserve distributed rebuild capacity and use the selected stripe width; verify the resulting drive count, stripe width, rebuild-area policy, and hardware support matrix with IBM before deployment.

HPE Primera and Alletra layouts distribute chunklets across the array; their default set sizes are modeled as 2 for RAID 1, 4 for RAID 5, and 8 for RAID 6. The visual is conceptual—the product may distribute parity and rebuild capacity rather than dedicate physical drives to those roles.

References: NetApp ONTAP RAID documentation, IBM FlashSystem DRAID documentation, HPE CPG layout documentation, and Synology RAID documentation.
Planning estimate only. Capacity and supported layouts depend on hardware generation, drive class, controller software, topology, and product release. Confirm the exact design with the vendor’s sizing and support documentation.