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

nfimich

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Dec 1, 2010
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just setting up my first array and wonder if in a raid 5 array with 4 matching 7200rpm drives if using a 10000rpm boot drive is worthwhile or is just a waste


thanks

scott
 

will1990

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Dec 2, 2010
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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
 

lysinger

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Nov 26, 2010
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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.