Hi All,

I'm building a new system on Asus P5Q motherboard with 3 Hard drives (all the same). What do you think will be the best in terms of performance etc... Dedicated HDD for OS + Raid 1 for data or RAID 5?

Thank you,

Well for performance the Raid 1 option would be the best. The only things Raid 5 is, is Raid 1 + Parity for data protection purposes. Raid 1 is going to always be the fastest but especially if it's hardware based.

I was just reading that software based raid 5 is horrible as far as the overhead.

Here's another thought. You could buy 1 more of the same drive and run a Raid 1+0. It provides the data protection and performance of both types.

Hope this helps.

If you were doing this on the motherbaord I would buy 1 hard drive, such as a WD Raptor for OS/apps and either RAID 1 as you listed or RAID 5 with bigger drives for data if you can get 1 more drive. RAID 5 does have slower writes and slower access time but it is fast in read speed due to striped data across multiple drives.

Heya,

You have 3 drives, so several possibilities.

Performance: Raid 0. It's the maximum performance with zero redundancy. If you only want things to be faster and nothing else, then RAID 0 with 3 drives will give you that. Pure performance, nothing more. Trade off is that if one drive fails, they all fail.

Redundancy or Safty: Raid 1. This will not use all 3 of your drives. It will use two drives. Raid 1 is a mirror. It writes to two drives, so that if one fails the other has the data. There is zero performance gain from this. You do not go faster. In fact, you get a slower write speed. Zero increase in read speed. The only point of Raid 1 is to get safty, ie, a way to recover data if a drive fails.

Performance and Safty: Raid 5. This uses 3 drives minimum. This is the perfect harmony of speed and redundancy. It makes a RAID0 across all three drives, but also writes partiy across all three drives. This works like having 0 and 1. Your storage will be the size of 2 of the drives out of 3, but, you get the speed of RAID0 and the saftey of having a backup so that if one drive fails, you don't lose your data (this is what the parity is for). You lose a 3rd of your storage space, but you retain speed and safty.

If all you want is performance, go with RAID0. You get maximum storage and maximum speed. Your risk is one disk failing causes all to fail. If you want performance and redundancy (to avoid drive failure wrecking your array) then go RAID5 for high performance, redundancy, and you will have the storage capacity of 2 out of the 3 drives.

-- A dedicated drive for your OS is a good idea. If you add RAID1 to it, you do not get a performance boost, you just get "safty." RAID5 will give you safty AND performance. Overall, RAID5 is simply your better choice with the number of drives you're talking about. Another option is to put your OS on a single drive that is NOT on RAID and then to make a RAID0 array out of the two other drives. Really, it depends what you want to do.

Very best,

Generally speaking RAID 5 is best for data. Raid 1 is best for the OS or you can just get this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136260 for the OS. But definitely raid 5 for data.