RAID 1 vs. RAID 5

[bangshi]

I require 8TB of usable space.

I am trying to find the ideal RAID set up to maximise performance against cost.

Is the performance hit of RAID 5 detrimental to the point that it is worth the additional cost of additional drives for a mirroring RAID 1 setup?

Also, a question about RAID 5 - can I set one up with the minimum of 3 drives and just add additional drives as required to the array with ease? Is there any kind of time to wait for it to build to take into account the new drive in the array?

 

[bangshi]

Thanks for the replies. When I say performance I'm not really looking for gains, just not looking for big performance losses compared to single drive.

When you say RAID is not ideal for the home and better off with backups, what do you suggest? The only alternative I can think of is optical disk backups but that is time consuming for terabytes of data!

 

[bangshi]

OK, so in that scenario I could have two or three drives set up as a spanned disk in Windows and then an additional two or three drives as another spanned disk and sync between them. This sounds a bit more simple.