3 Hard drives....Raid 3 and 4 or RAID 5? if I want performance?

L1qu1d

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3 Hard drives....Raid 3 and 4 or RAID 5? if I want performance and Increased space???

I have 3 WD 250 gig Caviar SATA drives. 2 of them are already in raid form.

Do I have to reformat to place a 3rd? and what Raid should I use???


Thank YOu!
 

L1qu1d

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I'm new to this raid thing I dont use a controller I just use the motherboard drivers and Chipsets. lol I have the ASUS M2N-E SLI. :) I just want to see improved performance rather than just going and buying a Western digital Raptor. :p
 

einstein4pres

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There's still a controller, it's just on the mobo. I'd suggest reading your mobo manual to determine what kind of RAID and RAID migration options you have.

You can RAID 0 over more than two disks, but you would need to rebuild the array, which your integrated RAID controller might or might not be able to do.
 
just to add to this you should be able to access it from Advanced - NVraid..

Raid 0 is fastest...
Raid 1 is safest....
Raid 5 is all around good but needs more drives(3 and up) and can be slower with onboard controllers

You are looking for raid 0 (stripe)

Make sure you have your files you want backed up(you should do this for any setup anyway...)....as in if one drive fails in most cases the array fails(for raid 0)....
 

jt001

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RAID-0 two of them, and keep the second as a scratch/backup disk. RAID-5 is not meant for the desktop user, and without a decent controller with XOR offloading the performance will suck anyway.
 
What are the characteristics of your application that makes you think that you will get improved performance from any type of raid? There are some, but in general raid is not helpful in the single user environment. It is usually better to distribute your data over several individual drives instead.
 

derek2006

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Go for the raid 0 and do all 3 drives. It increases your chance of data loss though by 3 because now instead of worrying about 1 drive failing you have to worry about 1 of your 3. What was suggested earlier is that just to raid 2 of them and keep the extra for backup.

I have 2 computers without a Raid 0 and this 3rd one that does. This one and a other have similar specs. And the one with Raid 0 is tons faster. I actually kinda dread the other computer, it even has less stuff on it and the OS install is about 6 months newer than this computer. But the Raid makes it fast.

Personally I think that the performance outweighs the risk by far. But I don't have anything real important on the drives so ya. (The raid that is, I have my 500 gig for storage.)

 

amnotanoobie

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Raid-0 (Max performance for 2 drives, also relatively cheap) needs at least 2 drives. Raid-0 splits the data between the drives. If one drive fails all your data is now unrecoverable, even if the other drive(s) are still working.

Raid-1 (Max reliabilty) is a 1:1 thing, 1 hard disk, 1 backup.

Raid 0+1 (A balance of reliability and performance, though cost is an issue) is a setup that needs 4 drives, two pairs of Raid-0, wherein the secondary Raid-0 would function as like the backup drive on a Raid-1 setup.

Raid-5 (Max performance, though you'd need an expensive controller for this) needs at least 4 drives if you don't want the redundancy, put in the 5th if you need redundancy.

Raid-6 is a raid 5 with 2 redundant drives instead of 1.



You could just JBOD the three (Just-a-Bunch-Of-Drives) though the performance increase is not guranteed. Though JBOD is just like Raid-0, if one drive fails, all you can do is reformat them all.
 

L1qu1d

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Actually I read that with RAid 5 theres a minimum of 3 Hard drives and yes performance increase is much greater but with a external controller...while with onboard controller it is still greater than 2 drives... Read in MAXIMUM PC:p
I just want to decrease game load times. I know that my Quake 4 use to take for ever to load with Ultra Graphics even with the 8800 GTS SLI mode...when I created the RAid drive...it loaded as fast as it would or not faster than it loaded on just High Graphics.
Not only that Windows Install was much quicker, My file transfer is quicker, Loading times are better...I just wanted to benefit from having 3 Hard drives:p

 

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