3 x VelociRaptor suggestions.

I have 3 x 300 GB VelociRaptors on hand. Currently I am using 1 but I picked up two more for a good price. I was thinking of putting them in a RAID 0 for the best performance or a RAID 5 for some redundancy.

I don't store any "Data" on the raptors. That is reserved for another single drive. I just have my OS and games. The only hardship if the Drive(s) and/or RAID should fail is that I would have to rebuild the OS.

Specs are the top machine in my sig. I have 24 GB RAM so I haven't used swap space in a long time. The drives would just be set up for speed.

If you had 3 x raptors, how would you configure them? Using the on board controller of the MB.

Stripe all the way. Just make a backup image from time to time and you won't have to worry about reinstallation of everything if one goes belly up.

+1 on RAID0. RAID5 is just going to hurt your performance and is really meant for data availability, not backups.

Another +1 for Raid 0.

Charr said:

+1 on RAID0. RAID5 is just going to hurt your performance and is really meant for data availability, not backups.

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For writes, yes, in particular depending on your controller. For reads, it's nearly on par with RAID 0.

Last night I set up two of the drives in RAID 0. The third drive I will give to my son who is living with a 74 GB version.

I did a HD Tach both before and after and have nearly double my HDD performance. WOOT! The Windows score went up from 5.9 to 6.2 which is still my lowest score but it shows an improvement.

Thank you guys for the input.