Host-based RAID-5 volumes are recommended for read-mostly data, because noticeable performance degradation may occur due to the overhead that writes generate.

Host-based RAID-5 volumes should be avoided in applications in which the rate of updates is high (more than about 10% of the aggregate I/O request-handling capacity of the disks constituting the volume), unless sufficient host CPU cycles are available. Disk controller RAID-5 volumes equipped with nonvolatile write-back cache may be used for more write-intensive applications (up to about 40% of the aggregate I/O request capacity of the disks composing the volume).