Debating on new array of raid 0 or raid 5

Well, it really comes down to what you think your data and time is worth, right?

4x drives in RAID-0 would give you pretty darn good performance. Of course, if one drive fails, as you know the entire array goes *poof* and you have to rebuild from scratch. No big deal if you have daily images of the array and it's just a matter of restoring from backup. Bigger deal if you have to reinstall everything from scratch.

Personally, as an opinion, I've avoided RAID-5 arrays like the plague because the write-speeds to them is horrendous, even with hardware RAID controllers with XOR support. For a main workstation, I'd honestly go with a 2-drive RAID-0, and a 2-drive RAID-1. The amount of space is the same as a RAID-5, but I wouldn't be suffering on the write speeds as badly.

If you *must* choose between the two, I'd go with the RAID-0 and get a fifth drive for data backup .

If you'd be getting a PERC6/i anyways, RAID-10!!! I'd support you on RAID-10!

P.S. let's not get into any "flame wars" or anything here. The OP is asking for highly subjective *opinions*.

Should have put in the OP that i plan to use a 1TB drive (provided i can pull it from a external enclosure and put a 500GB in its place) as my backup/restore drive for reinstall and game backups.

I am kind of against raid 0+1/10 due to you loose have your GB of HDDs to redundancy. I had a 0+1 on this board but migrated to 4 drive raid-0 since i was running out of space

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What "backup feature" (of RAID) are you referring to specifically? I've never considered RAID to be any sort of "backup" at all.

I believe that RAID is useful even on home servers where the amount of personal digital information is growing rapidly. And also useful if the only computer one has is also their "server"

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RAID in a server and RAID in a home workstation serve the same purpose... performance enhancement and data redundancy.

You may be satisfied with the reliability numbers spewed by hard drive manufacturers, however there are many of us here who feel that the value of our our data is worth more than the cost of a few drives and a dedicated RAID controller. This is more than being just about theory application... it's about taking knowledgeable, proactive steps to protect your data. I learned a lot when I was in college, but someday you'll come to understand that theories you read in a book or hear in a class isn't always as reliable as first hand real life application.

This is OCN, a forum in which people share ideas on enhancing the performance of their PC's, and I think that RAID offers tremendous enhancements for those who implement and maintain their arrays properly.

Some people are absolutely content with the performance of a single drive system, but then again, some people find that performance of an old 1 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM to be sufficient as well.

To the original poster, if you're looking for speed but want a backup of your data as well, add me to the list of people recommending a RAID0 array with a separate drive for backup. You should get exceptional performance and would still have a place to backup your files.

Backup=data recovery potential as RAID 1 employs simple disk mirroring and provides a means to duplicate the operating system files in the event of a disk failure.

Some server administrators consider disk mirroring and disk duplexing to offer one of the best guarantees of data recovery when a disk failure occurs.

RAID is not ment as a replacement for performing regular backups of data,but it increases the availibility of disk storage. With fault tolerance, data is written to more than one drive so in the event one drive fails,data can still be accessed from one of the remanining drives.

RAID came to be as a way to lenghten disk life,prevent data loss,enable realitively uninterupted access to data. RAID techniques came to be for use with servers but have been adapted for desktop home use. RAID as mentioned should not be used in place of backups to other media.

True RAID level 0 does offer performance enhancement through "striping" but a significant disadvantage to using level 0 is that if one disk fails, you can expect a large data loss on all volumes.

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It depends on how valuable that data is to you. For a PC, not important. For a storage server, the speed of 0+1/10 and redundancy are very appealing. And a 4 drive RAID 0 array has a 4x chance of loosing everything. Not important for the basic user, but to those who demand redundancy, a higher RAID level is required.

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This OCN, the pursuit of performance. People on here RAID for performance boosts. RAID 0 increases HDD speed for those of us who cannot afford an SSD. RAID will provide the redundancy some of us are looking for as well.

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RAID is never a solution to backups. It doesn't prevent accidental deletion or virii destroying everything. RAID is not the end all solution to backups. I'm glad you understand that, as many do not

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Correct, and repped. I agree with everything.

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RAID 0 does offer performance enhancement. And yes, it increases the likelihood of complete data loss, but the intelligent user does not store all data on a RAID 0 partition only. Look at vix, he's rockin' on 4x raptors RAID 0, and I'm sure he is loving it. I'm also sure he backs up regularly to external media or another drive. If a drive fails, so be it. Rebuild and get over it. Anybody who uses RAID 0 with no backups is a fool.

OP: I would suggest a 2 drive RAID 0, and use the rest for storage. Great performance, and a dedicated backup/storage drive.