What is faster for reads? 2 in raid 1 or three in raid 5

[chedderslam1976]

After losing one of three of my samsung f1 500gb drives in my raid 0 array, I am now running a pair in raid 1(500 gb total) for my os/boot drive. I also have three 1tb f1's in raid 5.

Which of the two arrays will be faster at:

1. Installing software(write) and saving files to?
2. Opening software, like starting a program(read?)?

I have been installing most of my software to the larger raid 5, but I am wondering if it would be worth it to install more commonly used software to the raid 1 array.

Would I even be able to tell the difference?

Thanks!

 

[Zenthar]

Technically, RAID 1 being a mirror, you would get no performance boost for writing (the same data needs to be written to both), but potentially twice the speed for read (can read from both). For RAID 5, the data is stripped so the write could potentially be faster as well as reads, but not 3 times as fast because of parity calculation and check. However, RAID 5 would probably introduce more latency which would make random read/write of small file slower (and I'm not sure exactly how it works if the file is smaller than the strip size).

If you are looking for speed, I would go toward a single SSD for OS/App drive and just back it up often if you fear loosing data.