Which RAID level should a cybersecurity administrator select to achieve two-drive redundancy for fault tolerance?

Choosing RAID 6 for two-drive redundancy offers significant advantages in ensuring data integrity and availability. RAID 6 uses a technique known as striping with dual parity. This means that data is distributed across multiple disks in a way that allows for the recovery of data even if two drives fail simultaneously.

In the event of a failure, RAID 6 can reconstruct the lost data from the remaining drives using the dual parity information, which is spread across the disk array. This construction makes it particularly beneficial in environments where data loss could have severe implications, allowing for high fault tolerance.

While RAID levels like 1 and 5 also provide redundancy, they have limitations. RAID 1 offers redundancy via mirroring (one drive mirrors another), which enables only single-drive fault tolerance. RAID 5 provides single-drive redundancy using parity but cannot withstand the failure of more than one drive without data loss. Therefore, RAID 6 stands out as the best choice for scenarios that require strong protection against data loss due to multiple drive failures.