WD640s in raid 5

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lawrence131

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Feb 23, 2005
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I setup this RAID array under a Raptor boot drive just for cheaper redundant storage thinking it would be sluggish, as my experience in the past with RAID 5 was never speedy. In daily use it seemed faster and more responsive than I expected so decided to run some tests. Turns out not so shabby for onboard ICH10R RAID5. Seems like newer onboard controllers and excessively powerful quad-cores has reduced the overhead RAID 5 puts on the system.
 
Is access time what is most important to gaming performance when it comes to load times, etc?

I'm trying to figure out what I want to do for a HD setup. If I want to use raid at all, or just get a fast boot/game drive, and use a slower 7200rpm large capacity drive for mass storage.

Any advice on what "specs" I should be looking for in a drive to optimize gaming/multitasking performance, as opposed to just data transfer (read/write)?
 
I have to wipe the array to do the HDTune write tests, which I shoulda done before filling them up with data ;/ I will be building another RAID setup soon so will do full testing before loading up with a terabyte of data.

For gaming or single-user desktop performance 2X SSD's or Velociraptors would be much faster if you require no storage or redundancy. RAID 5 is just an efficient way to get redundant storage without losing 1/2 the space as you retain 2/3 the space in a 3 drive array. My post was just to express my surprise on how much faster RAID 5 is now compared to a few years ago on a single core s939 system. The read transfer rate, access time, and CPU utilization on a very low budget setup was surprisingly good (ECS P45T-A, $75AR, and 3X WD640s for $70 each).
 
for speed and redundancy you would want RAID 10 or 0+1

min of 4 drive...


hmm 4 640gbs that 1.2TBs of speed.... would love to see that on a Perc5/i for a real low cost high speed fault tolerant setup...

seems like a good setup for a photoshop or HD video editing rig
 
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