3x1TB RAID 5 vs 2x2TB RAID 1?

I

ir0nw0lf

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Friend is buying a new server for his work. Room for 4 3.5" drives. The 500GB drive coming with it will be his boot drive with Server 2012 R2 x64 on it. He wants to go with a 2TB data array. He wants to do one of the following:

Choice #1: 3x1TB WD Re (Gold) SATA-3 drives, RAID 5

Choice #2: 2x2TB WD Re (Gold) SATA-3 drives, RAID 1

He told me it is ~$40 cheaper for the 3x1TB path.

Pros/cons for each choice?
 
In terms of capacity and fault tolerance, the same. Raid1 might be a little more performance, but not much. If you had a lot of spindles for raid 5 that would be a different story
 
More than likely, the RAID 5 will have better read performance but slower write performance. I would go for the RAID 1 for simplicity - typically drives in RAID 1 do not require a RAID controller to read- they can function as independent drives immediately in the case something goes wrong. That is not the case for RAID 5 - if the controller has issues, you need another similar controller to read the data.
 
I'm not a big fan of Raid 5 without an online spare especially with larger size drives. That being said, 2x2TB in Raid 1 will leave an additional HDD slot open for expandability. My ultimate recommendation would be for 4 x 2TB in RAID 6 or 4 x 1TB in RAID 6 if cost is that much of a factor. Better reliability and modern RAID cards alleviate much of the write penalty in RAID 6.
 
Thanks for the input, I think he decided to go the 2x2TB RAID 1 route.
 
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