RAID or Span F1's in a HTPC?

[neil_g]

ive got 4x 1TB F1's for my HTPC. mainly for movie and music playback but also for recording TV.

my first thought was to just span them within windows to get a 4TB drive.

but then i started thinking about RAID0 or 5 and the possible speed improvement (i know F1's arent exactly slow but every little helps right?!). but ive been reading that striping wont see any speed improvement for video playback where the filesize is greater than the block size.

i know the theory behind RAID striping, in theory the above about block sizes makes sense but does anyone have any real world experience with striping and playback? is it worth it or should i just span the drives?

 

[Saundie]

The network will be a bottleneck before the drives will, unless you have multiple gigabit NICs in your HTPC, so there's not going to be any real gain in going for RAID0. RAID5 provides a nice safety buffer in the event of a single hard drive failure, but is no substitute for a good backup. If you've got less than 3TB of data and don't see yourself reaching that level any time soon, RAID5 would probably be for the best.

Edit: also, would this be hardware RAID with a dedicated card, or software RAID inside the OS?

 

[neil_g]

its motherboard intel ICH9R based RAID controller.

yup completely agree about needing backup with RAID.

i might just stick to spanning then, cheers