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Raid 5 vs. 3 for media server

V

Vette5885

Gawd
Joined
Apr 12, 2005
Messages
629
I plan on making a file server with 4x320GB SATA hard drives (I now have 3x 7200.10s, so I plan on using those).The box will be running 1GB memory and P4 2.8/512/533 running at 3.0 (maybe 3.2 or 3.4, I haven't pushed the box enough yet)

It will store both Media (from MP3's up to HD .ts files) and backup files for 3-5 computers. I'm looking to get enough throughput for 2 or 3 HD streams.

I'm thinking of a 5-port raid3 card - but would it be better to run raid 5 over raid 3? What benefits are there? The raid3 cards seem to be cheaper than raid5 - is it worth the extra price?

Thanks
 
First, don't bother to overclock the CPU, it simply isn't worth it for a file server, and stability is more important than CPU speed in a file server. (an 800mhz P3 is fast enough to serve a thousand clients as a file server, hard drive speed will be the limitation)

Second, the only difference between RAID 5 and RAID 3 is that RAID 3 has a dedicated parity drive, while with RAID 5 the parity is distributed across all the drives. But this means that for a file server RAID 5 is much better.

If you want to know why, read this: http://www.bytepile.com/RAID_3_vs_RAID_5_In_HPC.php

But basically, With RAID 3 the parity drive has to be written to for every IO operation, so with multiple IO requests the server is always waiting on that drive. But with RAID 5 the next parity has a chance of being on an available drive so it isn't limited to waiting on one drive for every operation.
 
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