raid 0 or 5?

bobstone

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 3, 2005
Messages
361
hey all, I have 3 ST31500341AS seagate 1.5 TB drives, I was going to raid them all as one boot/game drive for my main computer.

using the onboard raid from ich10r on my p45 MB.

I am not to worried about total space as I have a decent and under used WHS setup. so I was thinking of a raid 5, but is the speed difference between the 0 and 5 big enough that I should go with the 0 just for speed sake? ( file safety is also not that big of a concern since I will backup to my whs also)

lastly, what type of performance gain could I expect from this ?

Thanks
Bob
 
RAID0 and RAID5 achieve two totally different goals. Just because you can setup a RAID does not mean you have to. RAID0 is about improving sequential transfer rates and nothing else while RAID5 is about redundancy. Which means your computer will not crash if one drive fails and you will not lose the data that changed since the last backup.

So you choose between speed and not losing maybe a day of work (and not having to restart your pc in case of a failed drive).
 
Also, most people will tell you that it isn't a good idea to use your onboard ICH10R for Raid 5. Raid 0 and 1 are fine, but anything else will be more trouble than it is worth.
 
also, raid 5 on the ICH10R is super slow. you'll have a speed decrease, and gain redundancy.
 
the reason I don't mind about either is I don't need the total space of all 3 drives, heck 1.5 tb total is more then I need with this setup. so I was just checking because if the speed difference was not to bad, having the redundancy might have saved me some time, however time was my only concern. I didn't need the redundancy.

but from what ya all said and what I have found out by searching is that...

raid 5 will not do well on the ich10r.
raid 5 takes FOREVER to build/rebuild.
raid 5 is quite a bit slower then raid 0.

so I will just go with the raid 0

thanks for the info all
Bob
 
What OS are you using? If you are using Linux, RAID 5 will be fine on any controller since it is software RAID. But if you are using Windows, or just want performance, RAID 0 is definitely the fastest option.
 
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