I've got 6x WD2003FYYS 2TB drives connected directly to an Adaptec 51245 controller. I have been experimenting with different configurations to determine which is the best for storing my Blu-Ray and DVD ISO files, along with family videos, pictures, music etc. So ideally I'd like RAID 6 as it gives some redundancy - I can't back up all the ISO's (although less of an issue as I have originals), but will back up the other files - although RAID 6 should give me a bit of extra comfort about drive failure too. Be that as it may, I've run ATTO benchmarks on the RAID 5 and 6 configurations with an odd outcome. On average, they both provide around 575MB/s write speeds (I would have thought RAID 6 would be a bit slower) but the read speed is the interesting bit. RAID 5 gets around 1680MB/s but RAID 6 maxes out at about 600MB/s. Any thoughts on why this is the case? I probably don't need maximum read speed, so perhaps I should stick with RAID 6, but for now I'm running RAID 5 with a hot spare. For my purposes (mainly streaming) faster read speed is the better option. However, I'm a bit confused - I would have expected the two read speeds to be similar.