RAID 1 vs. RAID 1+0

[Mr Jack]

Okay, I'm shortly going to be building myself a new PC. And I'm wondering about hard disc configuration. I'm definetly going to setting up a mirror array, but I'm trying to decide between getting 4x160Mb HDDs and setting them up using RAID 1+0, or 2x320Mb HDDs and setting them up RAID 1 only.

Buying the four HDDs is slightly more expensive, and (obviously) fills up more drive bays. Will I see any significant benefit in speed from it?

 

[rpstewart]

In theory RAID1+0 should give better read speeds due to the striping of data across the mirrors. I'm not sure what the write speed will be like, I ran RAID1 at one point and was not impressed - 20Mb/s writes were a real pain when the swap file was on that array.

I assume that you're aware that any form of mirroring will only give you hardware redundancy, it's not a backup - if you mistakenly delete a file it's gone from both disks.

 

[Mr Jack]

I assume that you're aware that any form of mirroring will only give you hardware redundancy, it's not a backup - if you mistakenly delete a file it's gone from both disks.

Yes. I intend to pick up a external harddrive for backups, and most of the important data I have get's backed up into the source control anyway.