Raid 5 or WD Raptor 10K RPM

[unst4blec0d3r]

Hi,

I'm trying to work specing out my first build for gaming. I had orginally decided on going with a 150GB Raptor drive. I figured the 10K RPM would be the way to go.

However after having my build reviewed by a few people, there came the talk of doing three 250GB drives in a Raid 5 setup. I was told that this could offer me faster read times, with only slightly slower write times while offering redundancy.

I could get the three 250GB drives for about the same price as the Raptor so I am curious. I would also like to do "some" video capture for gaming using something like fraps. The write speed of the drive may or may not be a big concern for that, but I'm pretty new to this, so I'm not sure.

Also if doing a Raid, I would just be using the Raid controller built into the Asus 680i motherboard.

Thanks in advance for any tips!

 

[nikhsub1]

hmm, in my experience raid 5 is dreadfully slow, I only use it where i need mass storage - raid1 is faster IMO. I have run raid forever, I have stopped. I now use a single 150 raptor and couldn't be happier.

 

[tuskenraider]

hmm, in my experience raid 5 is dreadfully slow, I only use it where i need mass storage

+1

 

[Patched]

and raid 5 can be very fast IF you are willing to buy a real hardware raid card that can costs twice as much as a raptor 150 >.< (Areca 1220 or Promise EX8350)

I have a raptor 740GD that I only use for the OS since my 4 disk (WD 400YR) raid 5 array can read and copy to itself faster than the raptor could write with the raid array as the source.

but, since you're using the MB for raid, the raptor is the better choice unless you might want to do raid 0+1/10. The speed from stripping plus redundancy from 4 HDs.

Probably the best bet would be to buy 2 250/300 gig drives and just raid 0 them and get a larger drive (when you got the money) for backups/storage

 

[uOpt]

Every RAID level only speeds up certain access patterns but not all.

It is always incorrect to just say "reads" and "write" are slowed down or sped up. There are many different kinds of read and write patterns.

A faster harddrive is a faster harddrive, pretty much independently of access pattern. You can beat it easily with RAID if you pick one RAID level for one access pattern but then you lose on the other patterns.

I wouldn't use RAID-5 from an onboard SATA controller anyway.