RAID 0 vs RAID 5

[c_hegge]

Re: RAID 0 vs RAID 5

With 3 drives, RAID essentially tripples your chance of failure, although maybe you'll be OK of those HDDs are reasonably well made and you don't store any data on them that you can't live without. I'm kinda thinking RAID 0 over 5, but I'm not really a big fan of RAID at all (other than 1).

[Mad_Professor]

Re: RAID 0 vs RAID 5

It depends on what you're going to use it for.

How big are the new drives?

Raid-5 is good for smaller drives, but if over 1TB, you're asking for trouble, I was lucky running 6 1TB in raid 5 for 3 years, before 6 months ago I moved to ZFS.

why not just jbod, and get ZFS. It comes on bsd distros, zfs on linux, zfs fuse, opensolaris, openindiana.

You can do raidz or z2, and have guarantee data integrity with zfs, if that's important to you. Only downside is you need a lot of ECC ram.

It really depends on what you're going to do with them.

[ratdude747]

Consider this a side thread to my other thread

By next week ( whenever the drives and cables some in) I'll be moving from a single 320gb drive to 3 74gb WD raptors.

I actually have 4 drives coming, however, the case only has 3 HDD bays and both the 320gb drive and the 4th raptor have new machines to go into.

Controlling the drives is a 3ware 9500 w/o BBU.

I am decent on my file backups...

I have 4 raid choices... and here's how they stack up:

RAID 0: No redundancy... but neither did a solo drive. Fastest choice. Gives me the most storage possible

RAID 1: Slowish. limits me to 74gb of space. Double redundancy... but since this is my main rig and not my file server (which DOES have RAID 1), I don't see the need

RAID 5: Initially Sounded good. Has fast reads but slow writes. Also subject to the write hole since i have no BBU (and such is more $$$ than it is worth).

JBOD: Kinda disregards the point of having a dedicated HW raid controller... if I were to do this, I'd just use the two twin-port silicon image controllers on the board. Better redundancy than RIAD 0 w/o the speed boost.

Hotspares: I've heard bad things about these... and for the same reasons as RAID 1, I don't see the point for this build.

Given those choices, I ruled out RAID 1 and JBOD pretty quick. I was leaning towards RAID 5 but RAID 0 sounds like a safer bet.

So... given what my situation is, which shall I choose? 0 or 5?