Hey guys, I was in a interesting war with a troll the other day.
I use a RAID 5 comprised of 3 1TB WD Red Drives for my D:/ Games and VMS drive. I am using RAID 5 for faster read speeds (lower load times) and some level of fault tolerance in the event of a drive failure. I am also trying to maximize usable space between the 3 drives.
Anyways I know he was trolling but he would not let it go that I was using a typical Redundancy Array that is no longer recommend for Redundancy for my games drive, calling it slow and stupid. The way I see it is I have a better chance of recovery than RAID 0 and better read speeds than RAID 1, and RAID 10 would require 4 drives for the same amount of space. I feel RAID 5 fits my situation and that is why I chose to use it.
Again I know he was trolling but it got me thinking is there anything better than RAID 5 that would decrease load times while still giving some level of fault tolerance as well as maximize the space between the drives?
Raid usually makes HDD seek-times even worse, unless you have a real nice mainboard with a hardware raidcontroller. So raid is probably hurting your speed unless you are mostly moving large filles like for instance a video editor would. For normal computer use a short access time is what you want, burst rates are not really all that relevant.
For redundancy i would rather make periodical updates on an external drive, or better yet have a NAS with ZFS
classic raid redundancy only protects you against disk-failure, but not against drives that corrupt data, which in my experience is far more often the case.
If you really want to do raid, i would consider Raid 10 the only somewhat useful option.
But really if you don't want to plonk down a bunch of money, go do backups on external drives, that you store with care.
I think you were missing the point, I am already in RAID 5 with a hardware RAID controller, using RAID 5 because it stripes, Yes I know RAID 10, but again its my games drive. I don't want to be at a LAN or playing a game and then drop a drive and the whole thing goes to shit like it would with RAID 0, but I want the striping benefits. Don't really have the space for a 4th drive, and even then it would still only yield 2 TB where RAID 5 would yield 3.
I want the striping benefits
which are much slower seek times, because i doubt you have an enterprise grade raid-controller. But even with an enterprise grade raid-controller yo have to wait until 2 drives have moved their head into position and the disk rotated so the data is below the head. If you got fragmented files or want to access allot of tiny non consecutive files. The performance is going to be comparable to a 1995 500mb IDE drive -> SSSSLLLLOOOOWWWWW
Also hard-drives mostly produce corrupt data when they fail, and striping won't protect against that.
I don't see any real world benefits of a Raid 5, apart from only dropping one drive to the floor, but that would ruin your Lanpary anyway, because it's going to take at least a day to reassemble the files and a new drive to get your system operational again.
Sorry backup-ing your files on an external drive still is the better choice imho.
Totally ! I am setting up a raid 10 because I built my first comp last year at 48 yrs of age no less , and I only had 1 -256 GB SSD , so I have added 3 more and now have a 1TB in raid 10
Raid 5 is pretty quick on most mid level consumer grade controllers, giving a decent boost over a single drive. I could agree with the rest you said, however. Raid 5 reassembles take forever and by the time it does the shindig would be over.
So yeah, just setup a backup and use the other drives for data.
"reassemble the files and a new drive to get your system operational again"
Raid 5 is capable of losing one drive and remaining operational.