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3 Drives best RAID solution for speed?

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paib   08-05-2009 at 10:28:24 PM

Hello,

I just received a Dell Precision 7500 with 3 hard drives (SAS 450GB 15k) and a DELL PERC 6i RAID controller. My priority is speed. I was wondering about two options:

- RAID 0 with all 3 discs
- 1 disk for the OS (XP) and 2 disks in RAID 0 (for data processing)

I also thought about a RAID 5, to get some data redundancy but read that write speed would decrease significantly, so I guess I'll just backup often on external hard drives.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Pablo

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Bronze Storage badge sub mesa   08-06-2009 at 12:42:15 AM
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RAID0, though i would recommend Vista/Win7 if you go this route, because you'll get more performance out of the array by avoiding a misalignment issue with Windows XP partitions, affecting the IOps performance of striping RAID.

Whether seperating your OS disk from the other stuff increases performance relies on your situation. I wouln't do a RAID5 in your case; thats aimed at large arrays where you don't want to waste 50% of your capacity to mirroring.

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paib   08-06-2009 at 05:40:27 AM
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sub mesa wrote :

RAID0, though i would recommend Vista/Win7 if you go this route, because you'll get more performance out of the array by avoiding a misalignment issue with Windows XP partitions, affecting the IOps performance of striping RAID.


I will not be able to get Vista or Win7 anytime soon, so could you please explain a bit more on the "misalignment issue"?


Whether seperating your OS disk from the other stuff increases performance relies on your situation. I wouln't do a RAID5 in your case; thats aimed at large arrays where you don't want to waste 50% of your capacity to mirroring.




OK. So running the OS on a separate disk (not in the RAID 0 volume) will improve the performance of the RAID 0....

Thanks a lot for your reply!,

Pablo

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thently   08-06-2009 at 04:40:05 PM
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Do all three in a raid 0 I have I 5 disk raid 0 sooo fast if your operating system is on the raid it will be allot faster too. Just be sure to back up often I just had 1 of my 5 drives go flaky on me. It does suck when I switched out the bad drive I had to reload... No big deal I like to reload every 6 months to a year anyway but still not fun when it's not in the plans.

T

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