Legit Reviews

Ok, so I'm in the design phases of WarMachine 2.0 and I'm trying to understand a few things early so I can know what purchases to make over the year.

I plan to use the new Corsair case as my chasis.



It will come with a hot swap SATA hard drive cage on the front of the case. That got me to thinking, my RAID 0 array is fundementially unstable. But it IS fast. So, I started reading and found out about RAID 10. That's a RAID 0 set nested in a RAID 1 mirrored set. Theoretically this would give me the fastest access time as well as full mirrored parity in the event I loose a drive.

Am I right about this? Is this the fastest RAID array I can run. I know RAID 5 gives me more ROOM, but that's not really an issue. I'm worried about pure, unaltered speed.

Raid 10 is the way to go for your purpose.

Go for Raid 50 if you got 6 HDDs

RAID5 performance is dependent on the the RAID controller. Unless you're buying a dedicated hardware RAID card, RAID10 is probably better. This is on the assumption you'll be using Windows and built-in RAID capabilities on the motherboard. Linux has pretty good software RAID so for the same number of drives, RAID5 is faster than RAID10 (you can stripe among a greater number of drives).

If you have a decent RAID card, then you can calculate the speed based on the number of drives. From what I've seen, a good RAID stack has barely any overhead so speed tests should reflect individual spindle speeds. That is, assuming you don't saturate the bus...

Sequential transfer speeds:
# of drives / RAID10 speed / RAID5 speed
4 / drive speed*2 / drive speed*3
6 / drive speed*3 / drive speed*5
n / drive speed*(n/2) / drive speed*(n-1)

The only problem with RAID 5 is the write speed, because the parity is calculated by an XOR linkage, which reduces the speed in comparison to Raid 0. This might not be that much, depending on the controller in use.

ratNukit wrote:The only problem with RAID 5 is the write speed, because the parity is calculated by an XOR linkage, which reduces the speed in comparison to Raid 0. This might not be that much, depending on the controller in use.

XOR calculation should be trivial. Keyword should. If you have a decent RAID controller, then there should only be a minimum performance penalty.

I'll be using the onboard RAID contoller of the motherboard, likely a Asus Rampage II. This is purely a gaming machine.

Anything mission critical goes on the server. I'll be using a dedicated RAID card in my server soon to make a 5x1tb RAID 5 array for storage purposes.

In that case, go RAID10.