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RAID 5 or RAID 10?
My computer is not fast enough. I alraedy have a good GFX card and a good processor and ram memory.
So I decided to boost the thing that slows me down most, harddrive. The frigging thing load all the time while I play and slows me down a bit.
So I went down to the store and got 4 of those new digital harddrives, NTEL X25-M 80GB SATA SSD. 4 80gb really fast harddrives RAIDed together should get things going fast. I wont need that much space, I later plan to put some stuff I have home together (just need some ram) to build a computer just for storing movies and music, and just sharing it in a network.
I was planing to use RAID 5 but my card also supports RAID 10, What do you guys think is most effective, 5 or 10?
10 is kinda new since I did any RAIDing last time on a old SCSI configuration last time.
Thankful for opinions (no nutcases talking about Raiding in games, thanks). 
Those digital harddrives are really neat, never crashes and really fast.
Comments
I don't know alot about RAID really, but for best performance wouldn't the best thing be to put them in RAID 0 in pairs, and use one pair as your system disk, and one pair for your most important games?
It really comes down to performance vs reliability.
The only reason you would go with a RAID 1+0 setup is if you wanted to try get decent performance with decent reliability. It's like the Bard of the RAIDs. :P
Anyway, this article should help.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
No. That would give me some speed but not as much as RAID 5. And with RAID 5 I can replace one HD without losing any data (even if it will cost me the space of one HD. If one goes with raid zero I loose 100% of the data, it kinda kills half my idea.
My question is more what the speed difference is between 5 and 10.
With 4 HDDs you will get better performance out of RAID 5 or 10 when compared to RAID 0. If he only had 2 HDDs then RAID 0 would be the obvious choice.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
There aren't any hard numbers that I know of. It's all subjective. All in all they're pretty close, but most people believe RAID 5 offers better performance for gaming.
Personally.... I dunno. Check out the article I posted above.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
Nor is it surprising that a 4-disk RAID 5 would be higher performance than a 4-disk RAID 1+0. Why? The RAID 5 is reading and writing data from 3 drives. The RAID 1+0 is only using 2 drives. You’d expect one to be 50% faster. And so it is.
Thanks man, this helped a lot. RAID 5 will make me lose 80 gigs but it will also be faster. And I am only in this for highest possible speed. Well, the possibility to replaceone HD if it breaks is good too of course.
For pure gaming speed, striping all four of them into a single RAID 0 configuration would be fastest, with the operating system and general storage on a seperate drive. With a 4 drive RAID 0 config you will only have 80 GB of storage and the loss of any drive will result in the loss of all information. This should not be a big concern with solid state drives.
Raid 5 is striping that allows for the loss of a single drive with no data loss. You would have 240 GB of storage and performance equal to 3 striped drived. This is usually considered a good comprimise if you are worried about data loss.
Raid 10 is both striping and mirroring. Basically, you will operate as if you had a single pair of drives in a RAID 0 configuration, but with redundency in case of failure.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
Thanks everyone. I will build the system with RAID 5 for both high speed and still some security, to loose all on a computer really sucks.
Thanks again, I have installed the system now. It is totally silent, you can only hear the processorfan. If and how much it will improve my gaming is something I will see soon, are currently downloading my game
There is one thing I hate with RAID, why did they force me to find and install a floppy to get windows running?
Welcome to the world of Windows as an IT person sees it.
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