RAID5 configuration question

[_33]

Hello,

OK I have 2 x WD2500KS already installed and I use that in RAID0 ATM.

But, I am planning on buying 2 x RE WD2500YS. I wanted to know if I could setup a RAID5 config using the 2 RE WD2500YS as the main storage and one WD2500KS as the 3rd device for the RAID5? The last WD2500KS will just be sold or used as a standalone.

Any other ideas welcome... I'm just not yet an expert in performance for RAID0 RAID5 configs. I'm planning of getting 2 RE WD2500YS specially for multi application performance and also for the RAID5.

I Suppose that having NCQ should help loading times and multi tasking times for disk I/O.

My bootup usually means my system is loading all the usual AVG, ATITOOL, STEAM, MESSENGER, TASKINFO, MBM5, Virtual Daemon, etc etc. In regular usage, we're talking about web browsing, playing games, downloading, video editing, music editing, making... Basically I'm looking to enhance the speed of windows in it's various management tasks. Most teddious being booting, anti virus, updating, loading games/levels...

[nn_step]

you'll lose a little bit of performance but it should work

[uOpt]

RAID-5 (a good implementation of RAID-5, aka probably not onboard SATA RAID) is actually faster than RAID-0 for some access patterns. Most notably, it is faster for small reads after random seeks, which is what most program startup consists of if you have enough RAM and the program doesn't create too much tempfile junk at startup.

Whatever you do, get a stopwatch and report back about your findings.

[_33]

RAID-5 (a good implementation of RAID-5, aka probably not onboard SATA RAID) is actually faster than RAID-0 for some access patterns. Most notably, it is faster for small reads after random seeks, which is what most program startup consists of if you have enough RAM and the program doesn't create too much tempfile junk at startup.

Whatever you do, get a stopwatch and report back about your findings.

My RAID-5 is NVRAID fro the DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ultra-D. It's possible to plug up to 4 drives. I have not bought the new drives yet and I still don't know if I should put 2 or 3 of those NCQ drives. Say 2 NCQ drives and 1 non NCQ that I currently have. Or just sell my 2 drives and buy 3 NCQ and start fresh. It's easy to say but wallet doesn't agree always.


Here's the performance of my RAID0 non NCQ setup (2 x WD2500KS w/ NVRAID setup as 64K strip and 4K clusters):

53340

53341

53342

53343

EDIT: I think it's 4K clusters, it's the standard windows NT, NTFS install.

[uOpt]

That's not the performance. It is some artificial benchmarking that might or might not have a connection with real-world performance.

What would be very useful is take the raid-0 array and stopwatch system boot and a couple other real-world things, then do the same with raid-5. Obviously the OS must not be reinstalled for this as that would mess with the startup time.

[nn_step]

That's not the performance. It is some artificial benchmarking that might or might not have a connection with real-world performance.

What would be very useful is take the raid-0 array and stopwatch system boot and a couple other real-world things, then do the same with raid-5. Obviously the OS must not be reinstalled for this as that would mess with the startup time.
but wouldn't that require him to actually face reality and not synthetically generated version of what "should" mean better?
Sense most Benchmarkers seem to have a bad reaction to actual reality.