Would 4 Drives in RAID 0+1 be noticeably faster than RAID 5?

[BoycottValvoline]

Topic pretty much explains the question.

I am using Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives if that would make any difference.

 

[MichaelD]

Short answer: NO.

Question: What RAID controller card are you using?

 

[BoycottValvoline]

Erm, you probably won't like this answer, but it's an onboard controller on my nF4 SLI-DR Expert mobo

Would running a straight RAID 0 array with only two drives be faster than both? I currently have three drives setup in RAID 5, but I would like to get a little more speed and saw that a 4th was on sale for only $70 with free shipping. Any suggestions for an affordable way to boost my overall HDD speed?

Edit: Would simply buying a decent RAID controller provide me with a noticeable speed boost?

 

[MichaelD]

Onboard=software RAID. Decent for speed. Lousy for data integrity or reliability.

First off: RAID does not equal BACKUP. If your data is important, back it up to CD and/or another HD regularly.

Two drive RAID0 is speedy. Four drive RAID 0 would be even faster (but not double the performance).

My opinion? Make a 2-drive RAID0 stripe with two of the drives. Use the third as a backup for email/my documents/pics/vids/whatever. Save your $70.

If you want to talk real hardware RAID...we can do that. But it's like taking a lesson from Emperor Palpatine; once you start, there is no going back...it's fast, it's reliable, it's exclusive (in the desktop world anyway) and it's hella expensive.

For example.

$320. PCI-E card. Supports just 4 SATA drives. I just picked this one quickly. I don't like it b/c it has a fan. Fans fail. Any enterprise-level card is passively cooled. The 8-port version of this card is double the price. That's just for starters.

But...this card with four SATAII drives in RAID 0 would scream like nobody's business. :evil:

Computing speed is no different than car speed. You want to go FAST? How much money you got?

 

[BoycottValvoline]

LOL, I admire your enthusiasm.

OK, brass tacks: I have a 4th drive that is 500 GBs that I could use for backup, but I'm not entirely sure what the best root is for backing up important stuff. I'd like something as automated as possible, would syncing a folder from my RAID array to that other drive and periodically burning important files onto CDR/DVDR be solid enough? I don't have anything that important, it'd just be a pain to lose it all. I'm currently putting blind faith into this RAID 5 array as my only sort of protection, but I've never had a hard drive fail (except for one that I spilled soy sauce on--long story) so I guess that's a lesson I'm fixing to learn the hard way.

So, 3 drives in a RAID 0 Array = noticeable speed increase FTW?

Would $70 for a 4 in RAID 0 be an even more noticeable increase? - and be worth it? (I paid $110 a piece for the first three + shipping so it would be very reasonable by comparison.

What about the reliability of RAID 0? If one drive crashes I'm pretty screwed, aren't I? I'd rather have a little redundancy than a barely noticeable speed increase. I don't really game or anything but I am constantly datamining poker tables so I have a program near constantly writing to my drives while another one is constantly reading. How much would RAID 0 speed up that process?

Thanks in advance for answering my somewhat wandering and seemingly endless line of questions.

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: MichaelD
Onboard=software RAID. Decent for speed. Lousy for data integrity or reliability.

First off: RAID does not equal BACKUP. If your data is important, back it up to CD and/or another HD regularly.

Two drive RAID0 is speedy. Four drive RAID 0 would be even faster (but not double the performance).

My opinion? Make a 2-drive RAID0 stripe with two of the drives. Use the third as a backup for email/my documents/pics/vids/whatever. Save your $70.

If you want to talk real hardware RAID...we can do that. But it's like taking a lesson from Emperor Palpatine; once you start, there is no going back...it's fast, it's reliable, it's exclusive (in the desktop world anyway) and it's hella expensive.

For example.

$320. PCI-E card. Supports just 4 SATA drives. I just picked this one quickly. I don't like it b/c it has a fan. Fans fail. Any enterprise-level card is passively cooled. The 8-port version of this card is double the price. That's just for starters.

But...this card with four SATAII drives in RAID 0 would scream like nobody's business. :evil:

Computing speed is no different than car speed. You want to go FAST? How much money you got?

Couple of things.

Onboard RAID is technically hardware since it does not depend on the host operating system and is bootable. Some may call it firmware raid while others call it dumb raid. (not that the user is dumb just that the controller is not intelligent but I'll leave semantics for the P&N folk )

A good hardware controller definitely scales linearly with increasing the number of spindles when striping. Even dumb hosts will do that up to three drives - because drives are fast they are hitting the caps of the onboard controllers - typically around 220-250 mByte/s.

Some Areca's have fans - my 1261ML does not but it does require airflow. Stuff it in a tight case and the squawker onboard will tell you when it's getting too stuffy - at 70°C. :Q A fan will allow it to be used in tighter quarters but good ventilation is always recommended. In a server rack the ventilation is never a problem - most 4U's can hold a bra to the front grille with no problems. :Q

RAID10 will give better writes than 5 on entry level controllers. Mid to high end controllers with lots of ram change the tides but tend to light a fire under your wallet at the same time.