Which RAID level is often seen in PACS archives?

• A. 0
• B. 1
• C. 5
• D. 10

Answer: (C)

RAID 5 is a practical balance of redundancy and storage efficiency for long-term image archives. It stripes data across disks with distributed parity, so the system can survive a single disk failure without losing data. In PACS archives, you’re storing vast amounts of imaging data and most access is read-oriented, so the striped data layout delivers solid read performance while using less extra space than mirroring. Parity calculations add some write overhead, but that’s typically acceptable for archival workloads where few writes occur compared to reads. While RAID 10 offers superior fault tolerance and faster writes, it uses more disks for the same usable capacity, making RAID 5 a common, cost-effective choice for archives.