ICH9R/X38 RAID 5 Performance

[Rudeboy]

I've just got an Asus Maximus Formula and am considering running raid. For the last couple of days I had RAID0 configured, but am weighing up the pro's and con's and I think loosing data far out weighs any speed gains I would get.

My question is, should I consider buying a 3rd identical 500GB hard disk and go down the RAID5 route so that I have a smaller performance increase and the resiliance that I can suffer a 1 disk failure, or should I consider 2 smaller drives for a RAID0 windows partition and leave the 500's as storage only?

I did try to use the search function, but "5" is below the 3 character minimum limit

 

[rpstewart]

Motherboard based RAID5 solutions tend to be pretty poor when it comes to write performance because they lack any hardware support for the XOR parity calculations. The ICH9R is meant to be better than most but it's by no means spectacular.

If you're worried about losing data then a good backup strategy is what you need more than anything. A redundant RAID array will give you the ability to continue working in the event of a single disk failure but it won't protect against anything else.