I have several 750GB HDs and planning to RAID them. If I do a RAID 5 and use that as my main drive would I suffer any performance or any other issues. I know the read will be slower than doing a RAID 0 but if do a RAID 5 over at least 4 drives can this be compensated? What number of drives would be the best to use or is it just best to do a RAID 0 with one set and RAID 5 the leftovers?

I'd really appreciate the help. Thx.

MM

Most people are going to ask you, "what this machine is going to be used for"? And what will you be using for a controller card along with the general specs of the rest of the system and how much if the budget for this project?

With RAID there are many factors that determine how best to setup a system.

Purpose and budget and platform description are 3 major peices of information that will help everyone here help you.

IMO anything other then raid 0 for the main drive is a waste of time. Unless this is a dedicated work only type machine. If you do everything on this pc then your most likely going to either get a virus, install crappy software, get a bad update orget enough corrupted files where you will have to reinstall. The raid 5 will not give you a backup it will duplicate your errors so IMO it only worth while as a storage solution.

If you wanted fault tolerance on your OS drives, with a combination of speed and performance that RAID0 gives, RAID 10 might be a possibility. You need four disks minimum, but at least you'll be protected against drive failures, and you won't have to offload a lot of CPU clocks towards parity calculations that come along with RAID 5. RAID 5 is more ideal for storage and transfer use rather than OS operation.

rozar - The majority use of this system will be for HD playback, storage, and editing from time to time. I haven't thought about the controller card because I am still planning this out and whether what I mentioned was a good option or not. I was just curious about performance if it were set up in a RAID 5 for the uses I mentioned otherwise I will go a different direction.

PsyKhiqZero - Thanks for the info. I am willing to take the risk and do a reinstall because I am going to backup the drive to an image of some sort on another computer or drive. If this is the case would you still not recommend doing RAID 5 for my uses which i mentioned to rozar?

Syntax Error - I am not entirely familiar with RAID 10. How many drives will I lose in space compared to RAID 5? Will I lose 1 or more?

Thanks again everyone for all the responses and help.

Raid 5 is a favorite for performance and redunancy. Redunancy insures that your system will not go down, redundancy IMO is not something your system needs. which is why I'm against raids in general purpose machines. *RAID 0 is not a real raid lvl*

An image is a backup and a damn good idea. I would still not recomened raid 5 as you only really need performance and not the redundancy. Again your most likely going to have to resort to your backup long before you'll need to recover the system due to drive failure. If you use onboard raid 5 the cpu cycles are wasted in redundancy you will not be utilizing, if you buy a dedicated raid card the money is better spent else where.

With 4 drives I would recomend my setup (of course). Have a 2 drive raid 0 system, install your os and programs here. This will give you the performance your looking for.

Then take the other 2 drives and setup a raid 1. Here keep you image file and any finished project files you wanna keep. The fact the image is protected by the raid 1 will give you the redundancy where you need it w/o sacraficing performance.

There has been a long debate here as the the benefits of RAID 0 as a boot drive and what it actually gets you over a single "really fast" drive such as a WD Raptor. You can read around and see what you think would be best for you. I used to have 2 Raptors in a RAID 0 for my boot and apps (then RAID 5 for data) and I dont anymore. I also have a 4 drive setup in my main computer now and I use a single fast drive for OS and apps and then a 3 drive RAID 5 setup for data.

If I were you I would start reading about the different RAID levels and the advantages and dis advantages of each one. There is no perfect RAID. You can google it or search here. Then choose what is best for your setup.

Just remember 1 thing RAID is redundancy (except 0) and is NOT backup. Make sure you also have a plan for data backup of your most important files.

Really as far as RAID goes it one of those tings that you need to try and decide for yourself. IMO however you do it...just do it!!

Thanks for the information. Looks like I need to get a hardware controller if I am gonna do a RAID 5 or 10. I need to get working on it lol.

Just wondering if I use an onboard controller will RAID 0 or 1 suffer like the RAID 5, improve, or is pointless? Is it best to do any RAID on a hardware controller or can using onboard controllers actually help.

I use onboard controller for raid 1 and 0 and it works just fine and i have noticed quite a difference. I don't even really notice the effect of the extra cpu overhead either. Since the onboard is usually there, I would give it a go first before spending alot on a dedicated raid card.

The only real problem with onboard controllers is that they are not transferable. if your motherboard goes down and you can't get a board with the same controller on it you may end up loosing your array. The dedicated card can be moved to the new mobo.

Bah! Too many Naysayers here. RAID has come a long way, so has the drives. I started out with 3 drives, setup as an OS Drive and 2 RAID 0 Data drives...It was nice, but so very very boring. So I went with RAID 5 and put them all togther. I have it partitioned as the normal:

65G - OS
10G - Swap/Temp
995G - Data

Boots fast, Great throughput, access times are phenominal. Now, I do have to admit, it's running on a quad core that's overclocked to 4Ghz. And I'm using a Gigabyte GS-X48-DQ6.

Sooner or later, yeah, I'll probably d/l some bad code...I have off-line backups as needed, but This is great insurance against a HD failure, which is where 100% of my issues have come from in the past.