What RAID is the best on performance?

A

Apollo1020

Geek Trainee
I have a question about RAID system. What RAID is the best on performace if I have 3 hard drives 200GB each? RAID 0,1 or 5? I need maximum performance and personal advice.

Thank you.
 
RAID 1: Uses mirroring. A copy of the data written to the harddisk is copied to all other harddisks.
RAID 5: Uses ECC. Recovery information is written to all other harddisks to be able to recover information.
RAID 0: Uses striping. Data is spread along all harddisks to get the fastest performance, but if one harddisk fails then all data is gone on all harddisks.

So the fastest way is RAID 0, but there is a chance of losing data. RAID 1 and 5 are slower, but safer.
 
RHochstenbach said:
RAID 1: Uses mirroring. A copy of the data written to the harddisk is copied to all other harddisks.
Click to expand...

Just to elaborate. RAID 1 can use two strategies. Disk mirroring and disk duplexing. Disk mirroring uses one controller specially designed to write identical data to two drives while duplexing uses two idependant controllers , therefore giving a greater degree of redundancy should the worst happen. Both of these techniques are slower than one HDD.

RAID 5 is probably one of the most commonly used RAID setups and requires at least three drives. With this setup the space of one of your three drives will be used to store parity data.

As RHochstenbach said RAID 0 is the quickest but is actually more risky than a single HDD!
 
So after reading your posts my question is... I have one SATA 300GB HDD.... so should i set my RAID to 0? And if so, would i do that in the BIOS?

THANKS
 
if you have 3 200 gig hard drives you could always get another 200 gig and set up a RAID 0+1 which copies all data to 2 identical raid 0 arrays, so if one drive fails, you have a back up and still have the performance of raid 0. there is a whole wiki on raid arrays if you want to check that out. lots of information for you
 
driftNWC said:
if you have 3 200 gig hard drives you could always get another 200 gig and set up a RAID 0+1 which copies all data to 2 identical raid 0 arrays, so if one drive fails, you have a back up and still have the performance of raid 0. there is a whole wiki on raid arrays if you want to check that out. lots of information for you
Click to expand...

Well, while yes, you could do this there is not much reason to. While yes, there is a tiny possibility of both of your hard drives failing simultaneously that chance is very, very small. That said, a RAID 5 will protect you from data loss just as well as a RAID 1, barring the infinitely small possibility that your drives fail simultaneously. So, a RAID 5 is your best option for almost any scenario (unless you are putting a very large number of drives in an array, then RAID 6 would be, but we don't really have to consider that here). It gives you most of the performance of a RAID 0 (It is faster than a RAID 0+1 because it doesn't have to write data to 4 places simultaneously) and most of the redundancy of a RAID 1.
 
WOW... max12590, you know what it's all about really good... thanks! :)

P.S. It would be nice, if you (with your knowledge) would give answers on my last posts. :D
 
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