RAID 5 Questions

[Zerix01]

RAID 10 looks interesting, but it doesn't seem cost efficient at all. I couldn't justify having 4 500GB drives and getting only 1 TB. I don't mind a comfy balance between performance and space.

These were my thoughts when I was looking for a RAID solution. I originally wanted RAID10 but just the thought of how much space is going to waste for how much money was just a show stopper. At least with RAID5 once you have your three drives setup than any further investment in drives is all for capacity while the redundancy part was already taken care of in the initial purchase.

 

[geofrancis]

hardware is the way to go for speed but for home use software should be fine

pro's for software

cost - no extra hardware required
versitile - can span across controllers
scaleability - you are only limited by the amount of ports
redundency - if the motherboard or controller dies you should be able to plug the array into another one no problem with hardware you would need to find the same card with the same firmware to guarantee it would work

pro's for hardware

speed - the card will scale better with more drives but once you have used that you have to get a card with more ports
resourses - the hardware card does most of the work leaving your cpu to do other things