How does RAID 5 stack up?

[man_from_uncle]

Dear all,

I don't think i've ever posted to this particular part of the forum and my knowledge of hard disks is pretty paultry, so please go easy on me.

I have been running 3 80gig Hitachi SATA-II hard disks in RAID 5 since I built my PC at the beginning of the year and don’t really have anything to complain about. Having said that I have never been spoilt with good hard disks or any other type of RAID and I was wondering where this type of set up stands in relation to RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 and in relation to Raptors, either alone or in RAID. I’ve got the upgrade bug again and I thought I’d learn something in this area to see if there’s any cost effective upgrades I could make.

So basically, how good is my hard disk set up compared to the other options on the table?

Thanks,

Uncle

 

[man_from_uncle]

Thanks for that guys. So RAID5 writes pretty slow but it reads pretty fast, is that right? That would certainly fit in with my experiance....and with common sense for that matter if my understanding of how data gets striped and read is correct.