Do more drives equal faster speed Raid 5

You won't really see any significant performance difference from 4 to 8 drives, but consider leaving one as a hot spare when you get to 8 drives as the failure risk increases.

With raid 5 the more drives you have the better performance you get esp as queue depth increases. Whether you see this improvement in a 'home' setting i'm not sure but in an enterprise world where the server is getting hit pretty hard 8 drive can nearly double the thoroughput of 4.

Perhaps the pertinent point here is that the Proavio EB8MS is not compatible with High Point cards. "The ProAVIO EB8MS 24TB is compatible with ATTO R380, ATTO R680, Areca 1880X or any external miniSAS RAID controller, Highpoint controller cards are not compatible with this product." -> http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/systems/timeline-...

Thanks guys! Ok I'm going to go ahead and purchase WD RE drives.

I'm using the raid for editing and VFX so speed is my friend. I need to be able to place back 2k 10bit footage.

JeauxBeaux. Very interesting! I wasn't aware of that website. I know for a fact that there are loads of people using highpoint controller cards with the proavio eb8ms. I know it's compatible.

Go with RAID 10, it will perform far better than any RAID 5 configuration using the same number of spindles.

I had no idea that RAID 10 offers good protection and it's faster than RAID 5. I will read up on it.

RAID 10 offers as good or better protection than RAID5 and offers better performance at the cost of usable space.

So why do people even use raid 5 then? I'm confused...

You lose half your storage on raid 10 no?

RAID 5 offers a lot more usable storage, especially with larger numbers of drives. If you have 6 1TB drives for instances if you use RAID5 you'll have 5TB of storage available (N-1). If you use these same 6 drives in RAID10 you will only have 3TB of usable storage (N / 2) but it will perform far better, especially for writes.

I'm mostly worried about read times. I will be working primarily with file sequences. I won't be ingesting footage from tape.

How much faster would the read times be on Raid 10?

For primarily read performance go with RAID 5, writes are slow but reads are very fast.

Read performance will be about the same as a RAID10 with the same number of spindles (not drives but active spindles, 6 drives in RIAD10 is 3 spindles, 6 drives in RAID5 is 5 spindles)

Yes! More spindle = faster, but it is also a function of I/O processor. In your case 8x with Intel IOP348 (1.2GHz) is plenty fast for it

Recommend using Desktop Hitachi drives create a RAID5 of out of 4 drives, when you go up to 8x then migrate to RAID6
You should get about about 600MB/s both READ/WRITE in sequential, but RANDOM you may have about 200MB/s+

Get an extra HDD as inventory, if your data is important
Do not wast you money in Enterprise HDD or space in RAID10