raid 0, and raid 5

[mtotho]

as far as i understand, there pretty much the same thing, and as far as i understand, it is basically sending about half the data to each harddrive to make it run faster. Which one of these shhould i use, and is it worth it to use more than 2 hardrive with one raid setup, or is the performance significantly increased with each additional hard drive? thanks

 

[G35x]

It all depends, if you have money to spend like no other, then go with 5 lol, not that it will make a huge difference...I would just get 2 raptors, and raid them in 0...Maybe even 0+1...

 

[MeTzenAs1]

its a difference in where the parity files stored.. to the best of my memory. This is a big deal because in some raids if enough of the parity is gone the drive(s) are lost.

 

[root]

raid five is pretty much useless with only two drives...

it works something like this...

raid 0 spans two disks without parity...

so disk A is 100 GB disk B is 100 GB you get a total size of 200GB and the data is stretched across the two disks...

obviously the more disks you add to the set the larger it gets, (though you have to add the disks as you set up the array.

raid five is a little more complicated, it strippes the disk the same as raid 0 does, but it also adds parity

so if you have 100gb disk A 100gb disk b 100 gb disk c 100 gb disk d and 100 gb disk e
disk a has 4/5 space devoted to data and 1/5 partity checking, the same across the other disks...
so whereas you have 5 100 gb disks, you'll only ever be able to use 400gb since the size of 1 disk will be taken up in parity checking...

there are several plusses to this, and a few negatives.
negatives are, you loose diskspace,
and it takes longer to write since parity has to be calculated.

positives are, it's faster to read from a raid 5 disk set,
and 1 disk can fail entierly and you will not loose data, data can be (mostly) contructed from the the other parity partitions.

 

[mtotho]

ok, thanks, but in raid 0, does it perform faster, i heard that say u have 2 hardrive..7200rpm, and in raid 0, its like having 10k rpm-14k rpm... just an estimate, is this true?

 

[G35x]

Not sure about specifically how fast, but yes it is faster...But I heard its only worth it, if you go to raptors at 10,000rpm each...But you will still see a improvment with load times and what not with 2 7200rmp drives.

 

[mtotho]

thanks g35x, honestly for me a single 7200 rpm is fast enough, i dont think its worth it to get the raptors for me, not as much room, i like my 2 320 gb sata seagates, altogether 640gb is plenty of space, and plus it will be significantly increased under raid 0, thanks.

 

[Aecliptic]

Would it be worth it to set my settings to raid 0 if Im gonna be OCing my computer... Im only gonna have one 7200 320gb seagate harddrive

 

[ownage]

You can't set a RAID array with one disk.

 

[alvino]

Haha, that's why it's called a Redundant Array of Independent Disks. Or if you're old-school, it was originally called a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Note the plural form... Yeah, you have to have two or more hard drives to set RAID.