P55 w/ Raid 0,5,10

I'm going to building an Air-OC'ed i7-860/p55 system real soon and I am looking to set up a RAID.

My current options involve the usage of either 640GB / 1TB WD black caviar drives. I will go with 3 drives if I choose Raid 5 or 4 drives if choosing Raid 10.

I'm also planning to slice out about 200GB using matrix for my games/apps/swapfile in Raid 0 and then put the rest in either RAID 5 or RAID 10.

1) Any recommendations/comments/issues with using either RAID 5 or RAID 10 in this situation? (I will be using the onboard controller with the P55 chipset)

2) Assuming I put my swap file on the RAID 0, is there any real reason to consider putting my OS on the RAID 0 slice as well, or better to just leave it on the 5/10?

Thanks in advance...

Note you will only be able to do 2 Partitions inside Matrix Raid.

So you'll have to choose either:
Raid 0 + 5
Raid 0 + 10
Raid 5 + 10

My experiences with Raid 5 and the intel controller (last revision) wasn't the best. Slow read/write speeds. With onboard raid I'd stick to simple solutions, Raid 0, Raid 1 and Raid 10.

+1 to sticking w/ RAID0 and RAID10.

Also, I'd put OS/Games/Apps on the RAID0 (200-300GB). Swapfile should be w/ the OS by default. If you want to get better performance from your swap file you need to put it on a different physical HDD. If it's on the same set of disks you are just going to thrash the head as it goes b/n your OS files and the swapfiles that are on different arrays, but contained w/n the same physical disks.

Then RAID10 the rest for Data/Storage/Backup. You can actually backup the RAID0 array onto your RAID10 array. That way if the RAID0 array fails you can most likely still get to your backup file(s) and restore.

So in other words, if I want to move the swapfile to the raid 0 slice for performance, not putting the OS on the raid 0 slice as well ( and putting it on the Raid 10 slice for redundancy) will be greatly detrimental to performance? (due to the head working back and forth between slices for OS/swap operations?)

garyttu said:

So in other words, if I want to move the swapfile to the raid 0 slice for performance, not putting the OS on the raid 0 slice as well ( and putting it on the Raid 10 slice for redundancy) will be greatly detrimental to performance? (due to the head working back and forth between slices for OS/swap operations?)

Click to expand...

If you want swap file on the RAIDed, the back end of the OS partition or the front side of the partition would be the best. Course putting it on another HDD will be better, if it gets used a lot.

garyttu said:

So in other words, if I want to move the swapfile to the raid 0 slice for performance, not putting the OS on the raid 0 slice as well ( and putting it on the Raid 10 slice for redundancy) will be greatly detrimental to performance? (due to the head working back and forth between slices for OS/swap operations?)

Click to expand...

Yeah. Basically, if you want to put your swap file where it will see a performance increase just get a separate drive. Otherwise just let Windows handle it.

Personally, I'd just let Windows handle it.

And I would create the RAID0 array first, so that it's on the fastest part of the disks, and put the OS in that array.

Then make sure to backup your RAID0 array regularly to the RAID10 array. If you do it right you can be back in action in minutes if you have a RAID0 failure. There is a basic write-up in the Matrix RAID sticky about this procedure.


And I'm not sure what your ultimate goals are, but after trying RAID0 and RAID10 on Intel, I've changed my overall strategy. The headaches of trying to run RAID on a rig that I actively OC has been problematic for me. RAID and random BSOD or lock-ups don't play well together in my experience. On RAID0 it was a killer, and on RAID10 is was a painful rebuild process that made any other work on the PC a chore.

Now I'm running just 1 300GB VR in AHCI mode on my main rig. No partitions, no arrays, no problems. All data is stored in my unRAID file server which has some decent fault tolerance (better than RAID5). I backup the VR to the file server, and can use an Acronis boot disc to reimage my VR in mere minutes if a problem arises (hasn't happened yet).

I do want to replace the VR w/ an SSD at some point. I might try RAID0 again, and see how a pair of SSDs hold-up as opposed to mechanical HDDs. At least I know now to backup the drive(s) before I do any OC testing.


Have you considered getting 1 SSD for OS/Programs/Games, and then getting a 1TB HDD for Storage/Backups? Storage access wouldn't be quite as quick, but the overall experience would be snappier, and there would be a lot less headaches.

Ok so i'm built with the OS on the Raid 0.

However, given that I could have put the OS on a Raid 10, it begs the question: Has anyone ever seen any numbers/benchmarks out there regarding real world performance (Load times, boot times, Application launches) of Raid 0 vs. 10 when it comes to the OS?
This is assuming that games/apps are still installed on the Raid 0 slice regardless.

Because putting the OS on the Raid 10 allows for continued system usage in the case of drive failure- so why bother with the raid 0 for the OS?