What Raid type is best?

On the DSS system I am going to be installing soon, what is the best raid type to use? I am using this raid controller http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/product...nce/SAS-51645/ . This will primarily be used for virtual machines, but will also be used for general file storage and backups. However my primary "fixation" if you will , would be to tune it for the optimum performance of the virtual machines. There will be 16 drives in this system, which right now will be sata drives, however I may go with the 10k rpm western digital raptor drives, at the cost of disk space. I currently am thinking raid 6, 50 or 60.

hi dweberwr

you may want to test a few different stripe sizes to get the best performance for the files that you are going to backup.