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RAID1 & RAID0 or RAID5? across 4 drives

K

Kochab

Member
I just got 2 320GB 7200.10 Barracudas today and have been thinking about possibly getting 2 more for RAID5 or RAID1 & RAID0 (not RAID1+0). I'm leaning towards the latter. For that setup I'd naturally put my OSs, incoming downloads and various critical files on the RAID1, then put games, video editing, and backed-up multimedia on RAID0. True, RAID5 would offer redundancy across all discs, but it would be one massive logical drive which has its own drawbacks: 1. multitasking negatively impacted 2. all drives have to power up together and stay on together.

I'm looking for real-world experience/feedback as I've never had a RAID setup before.
 
1) Not really, you'd be doing this with software RAID no doubt which would be more of a bottleneck (especially with 2 RAID arrays going at once). If you wanted decent speeds then you want a single 36GB Raptor as the OS drive, a seperate one for games and a third for files. If you're talking about processing data then use the game disk as a read drive and the third one as a write disk.

2) True, but i'd be very surprised if you did it differently even if it is possible in theory with 2 RAID arrays. The disadvantage is that all the drives will be working at once, which means they will fail sooner. Then again you're talking RAID 5 that's not a major worry.
 
Chances are you are going to be using the onboard raid controller? You probably wont see a great performance leap when using Raid 0, but can see a doubling of the failure rate. I suggest if you are looking for redundancy with good read and write to go with RAID 1, raid 5 is fast for reading, but slow for writing but offers you the ability to span across drives for a larger volume with redundancy. Dont worry about the logical drive issue, a single raid 5 volume can be chopped into many different logical drives just like a single drive can.

 
RAID 0 - GAIN Speed, loose reliability, max utilization of space. Great if you need a fast temp drive, but risky if you have any valuable data on it.

RAID 1 - GAIN reliability, loose space (n/2), same speed. Great for critica data, but a waste of a drive used in the mirror for things like programs and temp space.

RAID 5 - GAIN reliability, loose less space (n-1), slight loss in speed (debatable). Great if you want redundancy but don't want to give up half of your drive space.

NO RAID - No Loss/gain in speed, no loss/gain in reliabilty, no loss in space.

If you have no need for redundancy, and you are not doing video editing that requires large temp spaces, leave them as independant drives, you can't loose with that!
 
Nooo, hardware RAID can be faster or take the load off the CPU but it is no more failure resistant than software RAID, probably less so in some ways.
 
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