Software Raid 5 in Vista x64 worthwhile?

Archaea

Archaea

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My motherboard doesn't have a RAID controller on it, but I've been curious about creating a RAID 5 disk array. How is the software RAID Five performance through Vista 64 ultimate? I was trying to skim google for some benchmarks but couldn't find anything recent. Does anyone here do it? Would it penalize CPU performance to harshly to make it worthwhile?
 
I'm assuming when you talk about software raid in Vista that you are going to use an add-on card that uses software for raid 5.

Everytime anything writes to your raid 5 array, there will be a pause, the duration of which is determined by how much is going to be written to the drive and how long your cpu takes to calculate the needed parity. The intent of raid 5 is to mitigate storage cost while providing for protection against hard drive failure. Considering how cheap storage is getting these days, I would go with a raid 1 or a raid10 over a software raid 5.

The one worthwhile use I know of for software raid 5 is if you are building a media file server, than software raid 5 is not a bad choice as typically a media file is written once to a media file server and never updated after that, so write performance is less important than storage space.

For normal desktop use, I see software raid 5 as a really good way to slow your system down. Buying good backup software that will run automatically and can do an incremental backup in a matter of minutes is a better choice for most desktop use.

I can play COD4 while my backup is running, and the only hit on performance I notice is when the backup initially starts - I'll geta 3-4 second lag, then performance is back to normal. It is even less noticeably when I am coding.
 
Are you talking about dynamic disks and setting RAID5 for multiple disks through Disk Management? It's doable, and I know of some people that do that and get decent performance, but to be honest, I wouldn't trust that much data to Windows. Make sure to at least have a separate OS disk from the array, for obvious reasons.
 
Syntax Error said:
Are you talking about dynamic disks and setting RAID5 for multiple disks through Disk Management? It's doable, and I know of some people that do that and get decent performance.
Click to expand...

Yes...

But I can't find any benchmarks on the performance levels.
 
So get crackin on those benchmarks. :p

If you need the best performance then hardware raid is the way to go.
 
My question to you would be,.... why?!
 
If you are booting from a separate OS drive, and the RAID 5 drives are purely for storage of files that are not regularly updated then it's fine. That is how my media server is setup. That is the only way I would setup RAID 5. Considering how cheap drives are now I wouldn't even consider running just 3 drives in RAID 5 without a separate boot drive.

Running WD640 as boot/OS drive and seagate 1TB X 3 for storage.

I would personally feel much safer using a true RAID controller as well. Maybe I'm skeptical, but letting Vista handle my redundancy almost feels like it's adding almost as much risk as redundancy :)
 
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