I dunno about RAID-5 and Oracle.
All of the Oracle DBA books I've read have very specifically said that RAID-5 is exactly the wrong technology for RDBMS. This includes the big fat Oracle8 Complete Reference doorstop and the O'Reilly Oracle DBA book. If I recall correctly, somewhere on this planet, Oracle's own documentation admonishes DBAs not to use RAID-5.
Of course, only weenies read the documentation.
RAID 0+1 (a.k.a. "RAID-10") -- which is mirroring & striping -- is considered the "best" RAID configuration for RDBMS systems. Of course, if you chuck huge amounts of hardware at a poorly designed system, maybe you can make it up...
I thought Philip covered RAID technology is one of his books/articles.
