RAID 5 or 10

Ryan111

Ryan111

Ryan111

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What would be better? Just bought 2 more 500GB F3's.

Will be made up of 4 x Samsung F3 drives. Will have OS partition, Games Partition and Data partition.

Would raid 10 be better? Or should I go raid 5 for the extra speed? Currently running 2 in raid 0.
 
Have a look here:

RAID Comparison

Compared with what you have now RAID 10 will offer basically the same read/write speed and some redundancy but you'll still only have 1TB of storage.

RAID 5 should give faster read speeds but slower write speeds, some redundancy and you'll have 1.5TB of storage.
 
I wouldn't use RAID5 for an OS partition without a good RAID card behind it. Pagefile writes on a motherboard driven RAID5 array will be painful.
 
For some reason I have found that my PC loads maps on MW2 and other games slower than his? He is running a 955, 4GB, Samsung F3 1TB drive.

Why would a motherboard raid5 be terrible?
 
RAID5 creates redundancy by calculating a parity block for each set of data blocks. The parity calculation is quite intensive and unless the controller can keep up the write speed really suffers. Most motherboard controllers will top out at 30-50MB/s regardless of the disks used.
 
So Raid5 will give me bad performance then? Would Raid10 be better suited to me then? Or even Raid0? I have all of my stuff backed up so thats not a problem, just want some fast performance!
 
Too expensive for the ammount of disk space I want/need. I would need a minimum of 150GB which will be far too much. I think I'm gonna do a 4 disk Raid0 and just image it every now and then :) 200GB short stroke for OS and Games then Data on the Rest :)
 
Ryan111 said:
So Raid5 will give me bad performance then? Would Raid10 be better suited to me then? Or even Raid0? I have all of my stuff backed up so thats not a problem, just want some fast performance!
Click to expand...

RAID10 with 4 disks is near enough exactly the same performance as the RAID0 you have now with 2 disks. It just adds 2 extra disks to mirror the data for redundancy.

If you're after the fastest possible speeds with the 4 disks you have then set up a 4 disk RAID0 array.

Make sure you back everything up regularly as 1 failed disk will lose all your data.
 
What stripe size should I use?

I know I will be backing it up, Have a server with 3 x 1.5TB drives in it :)
 
I'm not sure what stripe size I am using at the minute, What would be faster for windows loading and games loading? 32k or 64k?
 
Surveyor said:
RAID10 with 4 disks is near enough exactly the same performance as the RAID0 you have now with 2 disks. It just adds 2 extra disks to mirror the data for redundancy.

If you're after the fastest possible speeds with the 4 disks you have then set up a 4 disk RAID0 array.

Make sure you back everything up regularly as 1 failed disk will lose all your data.
Click to expand...

+1
 
If 1 drive breaks I will probably just rebuiild the array with 3 drives instead. I will make an image of the OS partition, all my documents will be stored on the server anyway so thats fine. My Game installs are 90% off steam so no need to worry about them either.

What would the best bit of software be to make an exact system image of the OS drive that I can use to recover later? I don't mind paying a small fee is its worth it
 
Ryan111 said:
What about Acronis 2011? Would it be worth $50?
Click to expand...

If you have Windows 7 you can do it for free as it has software built in to make a drive image.

You can also make a Windows 7 recovery CD so you have something to boot from if the array fails.

You just need a backup disk large enough to make the image and if you need to restore the image it has to be to a drive at least as large as the one it was made from.

So if you had 4 x 500GB disks in RAID 0 you'd need a 2TB disk to make an image (assuming they were full).

If one of the 500GB disks failed you'd have to replace it in the array so that you're restoring to a drive the same size as the one the image came from.
 
Surveyor said:
If you have Windows 7 you can do it for free as it has software built in to make a drive image.

You can also make a Windows 7 recovery CD so you have something to boot from if the array fails.

You just need a backup disk large enough to make the image and if you need to restore the image it has to be to a drive at least as large as the one it was made from.

So if you had 4 x 500GB disks in RAID 0 you'd need a 2TB disk to make an image (assuming they were full).

If one of the 500GB disks failed you'd have to replace it in the array so that you're restoring to a drive the same size as the one the image came from.
Click to expand...

So I can use the software built in to windows 7? Can I place the image on a Network Share? The image won't be 2TB, I will use a max of about 500GB in total.
 
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