Raid 0 vs Raid 5

paradisiac · 6 Mar 2011 at 18:37

what is the difference performance wise, and am i right in thinking raid 5 is safer if one of the drives fails, although no important data will be saved on the drive, just windows and apps.
also, does it make a difference which sata ports i connect the 2 drives to?

malcolm · 6 Mar 2011 at 19:01

Raid 0, all the capacity of the discs is available. Faster reads and writes since data is 'striped' between the discs. If one drive fails, all data is lost. Good for boot discs as long as data is backed up regularly.

Raid 5, one disc is used for 'parity' information, the rest carry data. Minimum of three discs needed. If one drive fails the raid array can be 'rebuilt'. Slower write speed, significantly so with 'software' raid controllers as found on motherboards, less so with hardware raid controllers. Good for network data arrays.

This is well documented on wikipedia

More on Raid 5 here.

Port wise it depends on the motherboard, on some all ports can be used, others use a seperate controller for some ports.

rpstewart · 6 Mar 2011 at 19:04

In theory RAID5 will give you read speeds equivalent to a RAID0 array one drive smaller.

However the big difference is in write speeds. Without a dedicated controller card RAID5 write speeds can be pretty poor, 30-40MB/s is about the best a motherboard controller can manage.

paradisiac · 6 Mar 2011 at 19:06

rpstewart said:
In theory RAID5 will give you read speeds equivalent to a RAID0 array one drive smaller.

However the big difference is in write speeds. Without a dedicated controller card RAID5 write speeds can be pretty poor, 30-40MB/s is about the best a motherboard controller can manage.

thanks. does it matter what sata ports i use?

paradisiac · 6 Mar 2011 at 19:09

malcolm said:
Raid 0, all the capacity of the discs is available. Faster reads and writes since data is 'striped' between the discs. If one drive fails, all data is lost. Good for boot discs as long as data is backed up regularly.

Raid 5, one disc is used for 'parity' information, the rest carry data. Minimum of three discs needed. If one drive fails the raid array can be 'rebuilt'. Slower write speed, significantly so with 'software' raid controllers as found on motherboards, less so with hardware raid controllers. Good for network data arrays.

This is well documented on wikipedia

More on Raid 5 here.

Port wise it depends on the motherboard, on some all ports can be used, others use a seperate controller for some ports.

thanks

paradisiac · 7 Mar 2011 at 08:07

ok, installed windows on raid 0, it seems nippier from the little bits i have done on it. is it as simple as normal to add another hard drive to the system (not in raid) as it would normally be? i mean, just plug it in as normal, or do i have to go into the raid boot controller thing and change settings?
only ever raided on PATA drives before, im just worried, as obvs now the bios is set to raid and not AHCI, will i loose performance or get confusion adding additional storage drives?

rpstewart · 7 Mar 2011 at 09:41

It's been a while since I've dealt with AMD based RAID but you should be able to add an additional disk with no problems.

paradisiac · 7 Mar 2011 at 09:57

rpstewart said:
It's been a while since I've dealt with AMD based RAID but you should be able to add an additional disk with no problems.

ok thanks

i have 6 blue SATAIII connectors in a row, and then 2 white SATAIII ones in the bottom corner of the mobo, should i of used the white ones?