What is the minimum number of hard drives needed to configure RAID 5?

To configure RAID 5, a minimum of three hard drives is required. This configuration uses a technique called striping with parity, which enhances performance and provides fault tolerance. In RAID 5, data is evenly distributed across all drives, and parity information is also stored across these drives. This parity allows the system to reconstruct lost data in the event of a single drive failure.

With only one or two drives, it is impossible to implement RAID 5, as there would be insufficient drives to distribute both data and redundancy effectively. Having three drives allows for one to store parity information, ensuring that the array can recover from the failure of one drive while still maintaining the integrity and accessibility of the data. If there are four drives, RAID 5 still operates efficiently, but the minimum number necessary to set up the RAID 5 configuration is indeed three.