SATA RAID 5 Question

[videogamer323]

Ok I'm currently running 2 WD 120gig SATA drives in RAID 0 on my onboard controller. I'm getting a third HDD for sure so i can run RAID 5, but i was thinking I just got another $100 from building a computer for someone why not get another. so i would have 3 drives for striping and 1 for parity with raid 5 right, and how much faster would that be compared to 2 striping and 1 parity? Thanks muchly

 

[Snugglebear]

RAID5 is more restricted by the controller's performance than anything, as they need to pump out mass quantities of parity calcs. If you're doing this in software off a variety of different SATA controllers, I'd really not expect an extra drive to add much, if anything, in the way of performance.