RAID 5 vs RAID 0 performance

[Faffer]

I currently have 4x1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 in RAID 5 and 2x1TB Samsung F3 in RAID 0 on a LSI MegaRAID 8308ELP card. Windows 7 RC is installed on a partition on the RAID 0 array.

Is there any good reason for not simply having all 6 drives in the RAID 5 array and would I get better performance than with my current setup?

 

[rpstewart]

If you put all the drives into one array then it acts like a single drive. That means if you read and write to the drive at the same time then performance will be lower than reading from one and writing to another.

Whether this is a problem or not will depend on what you do. For example I have a RAID5 array and a RAID0 array in my PC. I keep my photos on the RAID5 array and the Lightroom database and previews on the RAID0 array. Doing that means that importing and preview building is a lot faster than having everything on one drive/array.

 

[JBod]

RAID5 = slow writes, so depends what your work load is like.