4 HDD in Raid 0?

[crinkleshoes]

RAID6 causes quite a large hit on the speed, even with a dedicated hardware RAID card, plus it's a waste of 2 drives in a 4 drive setup.

RAID5 means you only lose 1 drive to parity, so you get more space.
However you still take a performance hit with RAID5, especially on non hardware RAID like on motherboards.

^^ This ^^

Windows software raid-5 is surprisingly fast... I'm using that in my home server and accross 6x 3TB hdds in raid-5, I can get sustained read speeds of 400MB/s

I don't believe you can use that as a boot drive, however... so my recommendation would be to get a cheap, small capacity SSD for the operating system and use software raid 5 for the 4 hdds.

Otherwise, with how ludicrously cheap Cruicla M4s are now... I think you'd be silly not to buy one or two of those!

 

[Sasahara]

Sata III SSD > 4 raid 0 in pratically every use.

If you need large volume 1 HDD would be fast enough as a 2nd drive, as not many tasks really need over 130 Gb/s sequential read/write. (If you have a specific reason fair enough)