RAID 10 or RAID 6?

[DontEvenAskMeMyUsername]

Hey,

So I've been saving up to build a PC recently, and I've been planning out what components I should get. One thing I decided on is that I wanted to get a RAID using 6 SSDs. I have already decided on the hardware I want to use for it, so I'm not talking about what RAID controller I should use. Right now, I'm trying to decide what RAID type. I've took into consideration all the RAID types, and I didn't really like all of them. However, the two RAID types that caught my attention was RAID 6 and RAID 10. I decided against RAID 5, because I saw this YouTube video on how there's a chance where you can have a drive fail AND a read error at once in a RAID 5, and you would loose all your storage, unlike RAID 6.
However, I also found out that RAID 6 along with other RAID types that use parity systems have slower write speeds, because it needs to calculate parity. At that point, I didn't really know if I should get RAID 6 or RAID 10, since I couldn't find any articles or YT vids that go in depth about speeds of different RAID types. So I wanted to ask if I should get RAID 6 or RAID 10. Keep in mind I'll be using 6 drives, and that's important because RAID 10 would probably be faster with that, or maybe RAID 6 will be faster despite needing to calculate parity.

Thanks,
DontEvenAskMeMyUsername

 

[corroded]

Y not just go RAID0 and have an imaging plan for when it fails (not if) It will be super fast and with an imaging plan, recovery will not be hard.

Rus it as Boot/OS then a second array as game installs, but use a traditional HDD as image store and user data.

 

[Solandri]

RAID is not a backup. Unless you need 100% uptime, there's little point to RAID 1, 5, 6. You still need to back them up. If you don't need 100% uptime but want max speed, you should go for RAID 0 with a backup as corroded suggests.

That said, there's little point to RAID 0 on SSDs. Their speeds are already so fast that sequential read/writes are over in an instant. And making an instant 6x faster doesn't really save you much time. 4k read/writes OTOH are still limited to about 25 MB/s, and RAID 0 doesn't help speed those up since it takes a 4k write and splits it into two 4k writes across two drives (or in your case, six 4k writes across six drives). In fact SSDs are so fast that after you add in the overhead of RAID, the 4k speeds of a RAID 0 can actually be slower than for a single drive. And writing 100 MB of 4k data at 25 MB/s is going to take a lot, lot longer than writing 100 MB of sequential data at 3 GB/s.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

If you still wish to pursue this and want a combination of faster speed and reliability, I'd suggest taking a good look at ZFS. It's like RAID 5/6, except it codes the parity at the block level instead of the disk level. So if you somehow get a parity failure followed by a second failure during rebuild, it doesn't mark both disks as bad. It only marks the block as bad, meaning you lose a single file. It also adds some other nifty features like snapshots, "healing" of files suffering from bit rot, and deduplication (I'd suggest leaving this one off unless you absolutely need it - huge performance hit).

Unfortunately it's only natively available with Solaris and BSD Unix. There's a Linux port but it's going nowhere since Oracle has proven they will sue people for using stuff Sun previously released as open source (Java). The easiest ZFS implementation to use is FreeNAS, which is based on BSD Unix. But that's really designed for a NAS - serving files over the network. So Gigabit ethernet (125 MB/s) is going to be the main bottleneck.