Raid 5 vs Raid 10

lgray

lgray

lgray

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Hello forum users,

Im sure this has been in the forum somewhere before so appoligies for that first off. I have researched this question almost everywhere and cannot for the life of me get a straight answer so my question is this:

Which will provide me the best redundancy and hard disk speed (and you own personal opinion on each set up)

Cost is not a problem so please dont include that in your answers

RAID 5 with 4 x 500GB
or
RAID 10 with 4 x 750GB

as you can see im aiming at around 1.5tb hard disk space total

any help you can give would be golden, thanks
 
RAID5 should give the better sequential read rates, unless you spend a lot of money on a controller card then RAID10 will give better write speeds.

In theory RAID10 offers better redundancy in that it can survive two failed drives (as long as it's not two from the same mirror pair) and gives better perfomance in a degraded state than RAID5.

Which is better overall? That very much depends on what you need it for.
 
Or would it work out faster if i used only 2 drives?

all i basically want to know is what is the best way to get data redundancy with good performance but with 1.5TB in capacity.

Thanks
 
THe only issue with Raid 5 is that if one drive dies, the performance drops off massively, another option is to try Raid 3, though controller cards might be more expensive for this, but the benefit is performance doesn't degrade if a drive dies. Raid 10 would be ideal I guess.

Are these drives you already own? If not, you'd be better off buying 2 new 1.5TB drives and just setting up Raid 1 for them. The performance would be better as the drives themselves will be faster than any older 500GB or 750GB ones.
 
No I dont own the drives yet

But my research suggested that RAID 10 with 4 drives was faster than RAID 1 with 2.
 
lgray said:
No I dont own the drives yet

But my research suggested that RAID 10 with 4 drives was faster than RAID 1 with 2.
Click to expand...

Ah well in that case, then yes Raid 10 will be faster than Raid 1, but as the price difference between 750GB drives and 1TB is fairly small, you may want to get 4 of those instead and as you said cost is not a problem. The other thing you have to bare in mind is you won't be able to upgrade to larger drives later on without breaking the Raid setup, so the larger you can go now, the better really. Also you can never have enough hard drive space ;)
 
I wouldn't go with either setup, I'd use 2x1.5 or 2TB and use RAID 1 and make sure you have a backup in addition. You'd get more speed (reads RAID5 and reads/writes RAID 10) with the 4 disks but I think it's always best to have as few disks and as simple a setup as you can. Or at least go with the higher capacity disks and RAID 5 or 10 instead of the tiny ones.
 
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