What is the Best Hard Drive Config using 4 1TB Drives?

[vms_man]

Hello,
I'm looking for some advice and ideas on the best config for my system in regards to hard drives. I currently have my Win 7 loaded on RAID 0 using 2 Seagate 1TB ST1000DM003 drives. I also have 2 Spinpoint 1TB F3's. My MB is AsRock Z68 Pro3 supporting SATA 3 & 6 and capable of most RAID configs. I'd like to have speed, thus the RAID 0, but also want protection. Been thinking about RAID 10 using all 4 disks. Any better ideas? THanks!

 

[tomatthe]

I would put an ssd in there, and maybe use raid 5 on those 4 1tb drives.

Seems like you pretty much know your options with just the 4 1tb drives not sure what else you want to know on that one.

Someone will probably come along and say raid 1 or 10 isn't a backup etc . . . but hopefully you're already aware of that.

 

[MARSTG]

or even better do raid 5 on 3 of them and keep the 4th as online spare if the controller supports the function. Sure you loose one HDD but when another one will fail you will have an immediate spare, rebuild the matrix overnight and send the failed one to RMA in the mean time

 

[vms_man]

But is raid 5 fast? I don't want to drag down my performance by slowing down my disks. My current config (Raid 0) is pretty fast.
Won't Raid 5 slow it down. I use my PC for email, video editing and burning videos to DVD.