Will a raid 5 array benifit from having a high speed boot disk

I have tried both in a SATA raid 6 config and I did notice an improvement using a separate boot disks.

I used two western digital raptors in raid 0 for a boot volume on a separate raid card and then 5 samsung 1tb caviares for the raid 6 configuration.

Give it a go if you have the disks and see if you notice the difference. It makes sense from a ease of use point of view.

hope this helps.

Will

Microsoft recommends against boot drives in their servers being RAID 5 as the virtual memory pool gets read and written to quite often (it was either memory pool or some temp files, either way they recommended data to be on RAID 5 and boot on something else). This could explain the why it is faster.