Best raid for 4 drives

[Randy7w777]

Im building a new system with 4 1tb hard drives.
What is the fastest raid setup that would show up in windows as a drive c and d

Thank You

 

[rgd1101]

raid 0 will be the fastest, but if one drive fail, all data will be lost.

 

[emperor piehead]

i would do raid 10 which is raid 0 and 1 together. you lose two hard drives but it is much more reliable plus it is has the speed of zero.

 

[dingo07]

what do you want to accomplish? what's the intended use?

 

[vegettonox]

This actually depends on what your system supports, if your using the raid on the motherboard you usually have 0,1, 5,0+1

If your motherboard supports raid 5/6 I would suggest that which combines raid striping with parity information, I highly recommend it. Raid 10 is an interesting setup to be honest, it basically takes your drives and sets up subunits. The subunits are a set of 2 drives that are mirrored, the raid controller then takes these subunits and stripes them for speed.

It is slightly faster than raid 5/6 but in the same way it has roughly the same if not greater chances of loosing your data as raid 6, If you loose 2 drives your still alright but if you loose a 3rd your screwed. I don't find raid 10 to be as secure to be honest, for instance raid 6 you can loose 2 drives but they can be anywhere in the system. If you were running a raid 10 setup and lost 2 drives from the same subunit you would loose all your data so its not quite as secure.

There is another form of this called raid 0+1 which stripes the drives in the subunits, which are then mirrored to the other subunits. Raid 01 and 10 are faster than raid 5/6, but I am not comfortable with them unless you need the speed. If your looking to secure your data use raid 6, this however, requires 5 drives.

 

[s-h-a-w-n]

RAID 5
Free space: 3TB
Loss: 1TB
Capability: Support up to 1 disk failiure at the time

RAID 10
Free space: 2TB
Loss: 2TB
Capability: Support up to 2 disk failiure at the time.