[Skullmeat]

Yes, a minimum of 3 disks Is required for RAID 5.

RAID 1 only requires 2 disks and also has fault tolerance. Correct me If I'm wrong, but I believe It has better read performance.

RAID 1 is mirroring, that sacrifices storage space.

Definitely so- due to mirroring, It obviously requires twice as many drives.

Would you rate RAID 1 or RAID 5 better In read/write performance?

Can't say, since I haven't used anything other than RAID 0. To answer your question, from what I'm reading, RAID 5 has overtaken RAID 1 in performance, mainly due to more modern RAID controllers, and RAID 5's more widespread use these days.