Raid 0 vs Raid 5 speeds

Cyber Akuma

Cyber Akuma

Gawd
Joined
Jan 3, 2009
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Ok, considering using a decent hardware controller card (something in the $100 to $300 USD range) and purely talking about read/write speeds, ignoring anything else such as redundancy, would a Raid 0 setup be faster than a Raid 5 setup? Would the read or write speed be anything significant enough to choose it over Raid 5?
 
from what Ive seen 0 is a bit faster, no parity to worry about is all i could assume

but 5 isn't far off , id go 5 if i had the cash for another ssd, you go from twice the chances to loose everything, to being able to have a total drive failure and loose nothing
 
I was debating if I should go with two magnetic harddrives in raid0 for my os and four magnetic harddrives in raid 5 for storage....... or just go with 4 magnetic drives for os and storage in raid 5.

Putting them on one would be cheaper, require less used up PCI/PCI-E slots, and less drives, but with two I would be able to take the storage offline without having to bring the entire system offline. I wouldn't care about the raid0 array failing since it will just contain programs that I can reinstall.

Problem is I am also debating if I should put two small SSD drives in a raid0 used just for scratch data (capturing HD video in uncompressed huffyuv format).

Two raid 0 controllers and one raid 5 controller...... plus all the required drives, hell, I would also have a hard time finding a good case and motherboard to hold all that.

Not sure what to do.
 
for home use it seems like overkill if you don't need a lot of space grab 3 ssds and use raid 5 if you motherboard supports it and money isnt an option, if you need space and on a budget grab some 1tb wd blacks and run 3 of them in raid 5

other option run a pair of SSD raid 0 for your OS/Apps for Speed and a pair of 1tb in Raid 1 mirrior for data and redundancy or, if desired bump it up to raid 5 with an additional drive

for myself, i run 2 ssd in raid 0 for the OS/apps, and have 2 1tb drives in raid 1 mirror in my nas so anyone in the home can access the music, tv etc.

lots of options but as a home user raid 5 is overkill imo, if you want speed use raid 0 , if its important data use raid 1, or a combination of 1 of each like i do

keep in mind, even raid 5 is toast if your parody gets fubar, or the controller dies, at least with raid 1 you can break the mirror and drop the drive in any pc/usb enclosure and grab the data.
 
RAID0 is significantly faster then RAID5. If you want to just use 4 drives you could do RAID10 AKA 1+0 or 0+1, mirror of stripes or a stripe of mirrors. For RAID5 or RAID10 you will need a better controller then 1 or 0.
CanadaOwnsJoo: You are incorrect about RAID5. If your parity drive goes your array will function normally and you can then insert a new drive and rebuild the parity information.
 
Enlefo said:
RAID0 is significantly faster then RAID5. If you want to just use 4 drives you could do RAID10 AKA 1+0 or 0+1, mirror of stripes or a stripe of mirrors. For RAID5 or RAID10 you will need a better controller then 1 or 0.
CanadaOwnsJoo: You are incorrect about RAID5. If your parity drive goes your array will function normally and you can then insert a new drive and rebuild the parity information.
Click to expand...

I didn't mean the data on the drive but if the parity gets out of whack you can't even rebuild happened to me twice with dells now the downside you don't know until you try and replace a failed drive and get some invalid or corrupt parity error
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the read speeds for RAID0 and RAID5 are almost identical since they are both striped, however the write speed for RAID5 is significantly slower since it has to calculate AND write the parity bit
 
Linear writes to RAID-5 aren't bad with a decent RAID controller. However, random writes are pretty weak. In order to perform a write to a RAID-5 array, the controller has to read the entire block, perform the XOR calculation, then write the block's new data. Caching helps, but RAID-5 random write performance isn't great, and that's why it's a poor choice for typical desktop access patterns.
 
You didn't say how many drives, but I don't think you can buy an 8 port hardware raid 5 controller for $300.
 
If you end up using RAID 0, Intel's ICHxR southbridge does an excellent job in terms of performance at a fraction of the cost. If you end up with RAID 5/6, a business class four port sata2 raid controller that can actually rebuild every time runs around $300, depending on the brand. The next step up, 8 port, runs around $425.
 
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