Post
by Cerb » Wed Dec 05, 2007 1:19 pm
RAID: redundant array of independent disks.
RAID 0 will give the best bandwidth, but at the cost of latency. With every read and write, the latency is that of the slowest drive. RAID 0, with all *roll eyes* nerdy humor, is not redundant (level zero, get it?). Here, each drive has 1/n of the data (in a typical 2-drive array, half).
RAID 1 will give good read bandwidth, and should perform about the same as a single drive for writes. Otherwise, the performance will depend on the implementation. Each drive has all the data, so if one dies, it's still there.
RAID 10, or 0+1 (depending on who you talk to, these may be different, but don't worry about that) will give the redundancy benefits of RAID 1, with the speed benefits of RAID 0, by basically having the RAID 0 copied (a RAID 1 of a RAID 0).
RAID 3 and 5 can compete with RAID 0 for read speed, but are slow to write (each write requires several read and write operations). In these, the drives have part of the data, and there is checksum data to recover data of a lost drive with (for RAID 3, a drive is dedicated to that data). In a four-drive RAID 5, you have 3/4 the space (3 drive's worth data + 1 drive's worth recovery data), but it's efficient for the cost. and number of drives.
You'll generally have to reinstall the OS to do any of these. You set up the array in your controller's BIOS, install the controller driver, and then Windows sees a single drive that is th array.
But...to answer your last question, the best setup in terms of latency (for desktop workloads) is to use a single Raptor, and good defrag software. For overall performance with your hardware selection, a Raptor for OS, Apps, and pagefile, with the 'Cudas in a RAID 0. But, I personally wouldn't do it, unless you also added a 1TB drive and an external enclosure to do backups to.
