Which Raid Setup Would Be The Best?

[xxtigrisxx]

Currently building a new PC and am not sure which raid setup is the best. I was settling to Raid 4 HDD's to Raid 0+1 but still am not sure if its the best choice for performance. Which Raid level would you recommend for best performance?

Thank you.

 

[ThomasJ93]

Why not just go for one or two well performing drives that you don't run in a RAID array?

RAID 0+1 gives a nice performance, but also increases the chances of losing data. If you want high read speeds, but the write performance that's slightly higher than a single drive, RAID 5 might be an option for you.

 

[jcurry23]

raid 0+1 you need 4 drives, raid 5 you only need 3 drives

 

[ThomasJ93]

raid 0+1 you need 4 drives, raid 5 you only need 3 drives

You can still run RAID 5 with 4 drives or up. It gets less reliable when you add more drives in an array though.

 

[chunkymonster]

Just my humble opinion, don't go with RAID if you just want speedy drives, unless you are willing to take the data loss risk involved with RAID0. For the money you'd spend on multiple drives for a RAID array you might be better of just buying a single large SSD or a WD Velociraptor. Compare the price of your multiple drives for your RAID to the cost of a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro Series SSD at $250USD and the cost of the 500GB Western Digital Velociraptor 10,000rpm mechanical drive for $150USD. I bet the price of the SSD and Velociraptor are cheaper than the multiple drives for your RAID array and would most likely give you better performance; especially the SSD.

But if you are hard set for setting up a RAID, I wouldn't do a software RAID as software RAID typically unloads the parity calculations to your cpu and RAM slowing down read/write performance, I would recommend getting a dedicated hardware RAID controller. Albeit with the speed of cpu's an RAM nowadays, the hit from unloading the parity might be minimal but software RAID still sucks cycle from your cpu and eats RAM space.

Lastly, if you're using RAID to guard against data loss, then you are honestly better off getting a large TB drive and regularly backing up all your important data and back-up images of your OS.

 

[everlost]

raid 0 is striping. a higher perfomance option drives must be in identical pairs.

raid 1 is mirroring. like having a live backup, drives must be in identical pairs.

raid 10 is both the above. raid 1 mirrors your raid 0 disks. drives must be in idenical sets of 4.

raid 5 is like striping with with great error detection and recovery. meed minimum 3 identical drives to start, but and use any number of identical drives. but lower in performance and protection than raid 10.

some controllers/software alow you to build these arrays with non-identical disk but will limit you to the size of the smaller disk and speed of the slower disk. (1tb + 500gb = 1tb raid) and then ther is Jbod (just a bunch of disks) whcih software (windows/linux) creates a single logical volume from many physical disks.