RAID5 Performance Gain?

[aftermath]

I'm currently running a RAID1 configuration using 2 SATA Seagate 250GB
Drives. I was wondering if I had to put a 3rd drive in and convert the array
to a RAID5 Config, would I see a massive improvement in disk performance as
you see with striping (RAID0). Vista is definitely a bit more work intensive
on the drives......

 

[Guest]

RAID5 takes 3 or more hard drives. Vista rated my 3 Western Digital 10K
Raptor drives in a RAID5 config as 5.9 on it's rating scale. I think my
system flies. RAID5 will give you the best of both RAID0 and RAID1 with both
stripping and redundancy.

 

[Robert Moir]

I'm currently running a RAID1 configuration using 2 SATA Seagate 250GB
Drives. I was wondering if I had to put a 3rd drive in and convert
the array to a RAID5 Config, would I see a massive improvement in
disk performance as you see with striping (RAID0). Vista is
definitely a bit more work intensive on the drives......

RAID5 is not inherently faster than other types of RAID. In fact, for some
operations, it can be exactly the opposite.

 

[aftermath]

What about RAID10 (4 Drives) Isn't that supposed to give you best of both
worlds?

 

[Leythos]

What about RAID10 (4 Drives) Isn't that supposed to give you best of both
worlds?

If you don't use a RAID Controller card with dedicated RAM then you're just
playing and won't see any real gains in performance.

Oh, and 4 drives in a RAID 0+1 or 1+0 means you waste a LOT of space.

What are you doing that you "think" you need that level of performance on a
desktop OS?

 

[Robert Moir]

What about RAID10 (4 Drives) Isn't that supposed to give you best of
both worlds?

Basically, "what leythos said". A very smart contributor whose advice you
could do a lot worse than listen to.

You're talking about some rather specialised RAID configurations to speed up
your hard disk throughput a little. You won't see "Massive" gains from doing
any of this because of the nature of the hardware you're working with: the
disks will still spin at the same speed.

If you're desperate to see a big improvement in disk throughput on a home OS
then you might do well to consider hard drives with a higher speed (WD
Raptors spring to mind) and/or thinking about what you're actually doing,
where and why bottlenecks are occurring, and working to smooth these out.

For example, put the OS and pagefile onto a couple of mirrored raptors,
leave your data on the mirrored seagates you already have, work through
performance monitoring to find and eliminate particular problems (e.g
excessive paging... do you need to add more RAM?) and you'll probably see
more improvement than you will from creating ever more elaborate raid
configurations which really belong inside a server chassis imo.