Hey Rasta Mon,
It depends on your usage. Are you setting up a server? If so, then a raid 5 might be a good idea. If you are looking to make a good gaming setup I would recommend the raid 0 plus storage drive.
Raid 5 originally seems like a good idea for gaming, since it has the quickest read speeds of all the raids. However, with 3 drives (and the parity spread across all drives), this means more overall ACCESS time, which is bad for gaming. Just think of how long your levels would take to load if you had to wait for the computer to access all 3 drives.
You are going to get the best gaming performance from a raid 0 setup. Raid 0 is a terrible idea for a server, because if one drive fails you lose the whole array. Not only that, but you get half data capacity. If you have 2 500Gb drives, you'll only have 500Gb total drive space in raid 0.
But like I said, you will get the zippiest performance this way.
This is why you will see many people with a 3rd drive, usually not a raptor. This other drive will be used for backing up the data you don't want to lose if one of the discs in your raid array fails. Usually not a raptor because people are more interested in Gb/dollar ratio. A nice, fat drive that won't get too hot because it is just sitting there until needed.
For my latest build, I originally wanted to do a raid 5. I decided against it based on this information, which I garnered through various web resources, forums, and magazines.
It is a very simplistic explanation, and can probably be picked apart if anyone so chooses, but it gives you a general idea of the strengths and weaknesses of raid5 vs raid 0.
Don't do raid 5, boombaclod
(don't know how to spell that, but that is how it sounds.)
oh yeah, I also will be getting an external for backups. That should work with any setup, raid or not.
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