Home > Storage > Unity XT > Virtualization, Cloud & Applications > Dell Unity XT: Microsoft SQL Server Best Practices > RAID configurations
By default, Dell Unity XT storage chooses RAID 5 as the RAID protection level when creating a storage pool. This contradicts traditional guidance advocating RAID 1/0 for database workloads. The issue with traditional guidance is that it assumes spinning disks are used and does not consider SSDs and storage systems such as Dell Unity XT arrays that have been optimized for flash storage. Internal testing has shown that the performance difference in most configurations between RAID 5 and RAID 1/0 in Dell Unity XT All-Flash systems is negligible unless the workload is extremely write intensive for an extended time. Usually, the small performance gain of RAID 1/0 is not worth the reduced capacity and it is recommended to use the default configuration of RAID 5. For heavy write workloads where maximum write performance is required, RAID 1/0 can be used.