A certain application initially uses 1TB of drive space, but this is expected to double...

RAID 5 is a storage configuration that uses striping with parity, providing both improved performance and fault tolerance. It requires a minimum of three disks, where data and parity information are distributed across all drives. The storage capacity of a RAID 5 array is calculated as (N - 1) * S, where N is the number of drives, and S is the size of each drive.

Storage Requirements:

Initial Storage: 1TB

After 1 Year: Doubles to 2TB

After 2 Years: Doubles again to 4TB

To accommodate 4TB of data in a RAID 5 setup, we use the formula:

(N - 1) * 1TB ≥ 4TB

Solving for N:

N - 1 ≥ 4

N ≥ 5

Therefore, a minimum of 5 drives, each 1TB in size, is required to meet the projected storage needs. This configuration will provide a total usable capacity of 4TB, with 1TB allocated for parity to ensure fault tolerance.