How does RAID 5 benefit both performance and redundancy?

RAID 5 benefits both performance and redundancy primarily by distributing parity data across multiple drives. In a RAID 5 configuration, data is striped across multiple disks, and the parity information, which is used for redundancy, is also spread out along with the data. This distribution allows any one drive to fail without data loss since the parity information can rebuild that drive's data from the other functioning drives.

From a performance standpoint, because data is spread across several disks, read operations can be carried out concurrently, which significantly improves read speed compared to using a single disk. For write operations, while they are somewhat slower due to the need to compute and write the parity data, the overall efficiency is still enhanced compared to using a configuration that doesn't utilize striping.

The method of parity distribution enables RAID 5 to offer a good balance of both increased performance through simultaneous access and high levels of data security via redundancy, making it a popular choice in many storage solutions.