Locally attached RAID storage (RAID 5/6, RAID 10, or RAID 0)

For RAID disks, use these Endeca recommendations.

Storage availability after disk failure is usually a requirement for your RAID configuration. In this case, you may opt for either a read/write balanced configuration or a more purely read-oriented configuration.

For most implementations, a configuration that balances the demands of disk read and write activities is the best choice.

RAID 5/6. For some implementations, disk read speed is paramount and write speed is much less important to performance. For example, suppose the baseline index is never modified by partial updates, and new baseline indexes are moved into production only infrequently. In these implementations, a RAID 5 (or RAID 6) configuration improves availability with the least cost in spindles.
RAID 10 (also known as RAID 1+0) is an excellent choice for devices that are partitioned across a disk array of four or more spindles. RAID 10 provides the performance benefits of striping and the redundancy of mirroring.
RAID 0. The RAID 0 configuration is useful when storage availability after disk failure is not a concern. This is because both read and write activities are parallelized across all available spindles to decrease access latency and increase read and write throughput.

In any RAID configuration, high rotational speeds (such as 15k RPM or 10k RPM) are very beneficial to performance. Performance-oriented RAID controller features, such as battery-backed write caching, or a large cache size within the RAID controller, are also very beneficial to performance.