Which RAID level should a technician deploy while minimizing the number of disks and maintaining fault tolerance?

RAID 5 is an ideal choice when seeking to minimize the number of disks while still maintaining a level of fault tolerance. This RAID level combines both striping and parity, spreading the data and parity information across all disks in the array. This allows for better storage efficiency compared to other levels like RAID 1, which requires duplication of data on two disks, ultimately reducing usable capacity.

In RAID 5, with n-number of disks, the total usable capacity is (n - 1) disks, since one disk's worth of space is dedicated to parity. This design allows for one disk to fail without losing data, providing a good balance between performance, redundancy, and storage efficiency.

Other RAID levels like RAID 0 do not offer any fault tolerance, and RAID 10, while providing excellent performance and redundancy, requires a minimum of four disks and uses half the total capacity for mirroring, making it less space-efficient than RAID 5. Thus, when considering both fault tolerance and the minimization of required disk resources, RAID 5 stands out as the most effective solution.