RAID 5 Practical In a Desktop?

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Major_A
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RAID 5 Practical In a Desktop?

Post by Major_A »

I had to rebuild my main rig, Windows decided to take a dive. In the process I grabbed 2 other Samsung F1 1TB drives I had sitting around and configured a 3 drive RAID 5 array. Truth be told I'm not that impressed with the speed. I think when I was running 2XF1 in RAID 0 the system was snappier. But that is just my initial feeling. I keep all the stuff I can't lose or feel is important on a single drive in case the RAID array decides to head south.

What would you do? Continue to run 3 drives in RAID 5 or take out a failure equation and just run 2 drives in RAID 0? Really wish I had a UEFI board, then I could run 5X1TB F1's in RAID 0, as stupid as that is.
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Re: RAID 5 Practical In a Desktop?

Post by DragonFury »

it is practical for anything you do on your computer. But if you are a speed freak then run all four drives in RAID 0, Thats how I currently have all four of my Seagates Momentus 320 gig drives. RAID 5 like you seemed rather lacking to myself as well.

RAID 5 is geared for those who want to have an increased speed but want some form of redundancy then RAID 5 is the best alternative, if not and speed is the primary goal go RAID 0
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Major_A
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Re: RAID 5 Practical In a Desktop?

Post by Major_A »

I can't run RAID 0 with more than 2 drives, I only have 1TB drives sitting around. There's a BIOS limitation on creating an array bigger than 2TB.
http://www.technewshw.com/forum/showthread.php?t=600

Reason I went RAID 5 over RAID 0 is that it seems the more drives in any RAID array the better performance. Hence the rational that 3 is better than 2. Don't know if that's the case or not.

Seems like there is some kind of RAID imposed speed limit going on here.

Image

I just started sifting through my Photobucket pics and ran across this. This is ATTO, unclear what build, with 2 drives in RAID 0.

Image


Digging in Photobucket I found CrystalDiskMark run on the RAID 0 array.

Results:

RAID 5

Image

RAID 0

Image
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Major_A
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Re: RAID 5 Practical In a Desktop?

Post by Major_A »

In lieu of this discovery I'm going to pull a drive after I back up the install with Acronis. I thought installing programs was slow and this confirms it.

RAID 0

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Last edited by Major_A on Fri Mar 04, 2011 4:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Calamar
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Re: RAID 5 Practical In a Desktop?

Post by Calamar »

RAID 5 have more to do with redundancy than speed. You'll have fairly good read speeds, but write speed requires a XOR processing which slow downs speed unless you have a dedicated hardware raid controller.
With 4 disks you get the space of 3 and any of the 4 disk can fail without information loss (beware the rebuild!).
Also RAID 5 lvl requires a synchronize (parity check) from time to time (depends on usage: daily, weekly, monthly)

Maybe you'll get better results in RAID0+1 stripped + mirror. You've got fault tolerance (1 of each pair drives can fail without data loss) while you keep your RAID0 speed (4 drives required).

Or even RAID0 with 3 drives + 1 backup disk --> periodical backups of important info. Desktop users usually don't have 3TB of vital information :D
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Re: RAID 5 Practical In a Desktop?

Post by Major_A »

Originally I bought 5 of the drives, before knowing of the 2TB BIOS limitation. Since that time I've found a home for 2 of the drives. So I only had 3 to play with. Originally I was going to run a RAID 10 setup but I just left one of the other drives in it's current PC.
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