RAID 1 (2 drives) vs RAID 5 (3 drives)

[ericgcollyer]

See Topic Title. Which has better read/write performance?

[Waco]

RAID 1 by far, especially with small writes.

[El_Capitan]

Depends on what you're wanting them for. I'd always go for RAID 10 or RAID 1 over RAID 5, but that's just me.

[bigball1]

raid 1 for good read speeds ok write speeds

raid 0 for good read write speeds

raid 5 good read speeds but has poor write speeds

Edited March 28, 2012 by Bigball1

[ir_cow]

i suggest raid 1 unless you are doing work that requires more speed.

 

raid-1- 1 drive can fail, hence redundant

raid-0 - either drive goes bad and you lose all the data, none recoverable

raid-5 - speed of raid-0 BUT if more than 1 drive goes bad at a time you lose everything

 

if you limited to only 3 drives i would go with raid-5 for the speed and simi redundancy,

 

if you can get more (like 4 or more) go with raid-6 (basically raid-0 with redundancy)

 

 

otherwise, like i said at the start, if you don't need speed and want to save money, just get 2 drives and go with raid-1.

[ericgcollyer]

Thanks for all the replies. I've noticed that I have become somewhat of a leech in the forum, asking a whole lot more questions than I am answering. I will change as of today, you guys are the best.

 

I'm not sure if RAID 5 actually has improved write speeds. I currently have a RAID 5 array, but seem to get slow write speeds compared to a single drive I have in my system. I was just trying to get some opinions from other system builders. Thanks for all the help you have given me over the past couple of months.

[Waco]

RAID 1 is preferable in every way over RAID 5 when you have few drives. Unless you're doing 4+ drives in RAID 5 it's pointless. I would also suggest avoiding RAID 5 entirely if your drives are 1 TB or more because of the chances of a rebuild failure.

[MercuryDoun]

both raid 5 and raid 1 have write overhead that slows writes, but they both have quite good read speeds. At least with modern raid controllers.

 

And dont do raid 6... its not like raid 0 with redundancy... its raid 5 except with two parody drives instead of only one... Its even slower than raid 5 is!

 

Really the easiest way to decide is, even number of drives(2 or 4) go with RAID1 or 1+0(AKA 10), odd number of drives(3 or 5) go with raid-5.

 

This isn't knew information, im mostly just repeating what everyone else has already said, but another opinion never hurts!

[Waco]

Well RAID 1 writes as fast as a single drive. RAID 5 can write about the same for large files but it's slooooow for small writes.