BF2S Forums Raid 0 or 5

well i striped my 2 hdds so yeh raid 0 is better than 5 but also keep in mind that to raid your two hdds you must do it during a full partition of your pc

I think that you should use the raptor as the primary drive for windows and games. and then have the 250gbs raided so that the games and windows will load faster from the raptor then you will have this huge single driver (shown on windows when raided) for extra stuff like your screenshots, but use the raptor for application use

x5shadow5x wrote:

I think that you should use the raptor as the primary drive for windows and games. and then have the 250gbs raided so that the games and windows will load faster from the raptor then you will have this huge single driver (shown on windows when raided) for extra stuff like your screenshots, but use the raptor for application use

this suggestion is actually the best choice IMO.

RAID 5 is you can afford it, RAID 0 for just 2 drives at performance

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion here about RAID levels and what they do. So for a quick overview..

RAID 0 (either concatination OR striping - you choose).

Concatination is where you stick the drives together to make one big drive. When the first drive is full the data slops over on to the second one.

Advantages - You can make HUGE virtual drives
Disadvantages - Not that fast and if one drive failes you loose all your data.

Spriping is where two or more drives are put together but the data is written/read from each drive in turn.

Advantages - You can make HUGE virtual drives and its writes are faster than concat, mirroring and RAID 5.
Disadvantages - One drive fails and you've lost all your data.

RAID 1

Mirroring is where data is written to two (or more) different drives at the same time. Its mainly used for drive protection as if a single drive fails you have another working copy of the data.

Advantages - Faster reads than concat drives. Low risk of data loss.
Disadvantages - Writes are slower than striping. "Wastes" one drives worth of data storage area to keep the mirror of the data.

RAID 5 - I'll skip the other RAID levels as they aren't used much.

RAID 5 uses 3+ disks to store data and partity information. The idea being, if a drive fails then the parity data on the other drives can work out what the missing drive contained. The downside is that the useable area on the drives must be the same and you "loose" the capacity of at least one drive for the partity data (ie if you have 2x 250 and 1x100 then the RAID 5 sive is 200Gb!).

Advantages - A good mix of protection and usable drive space. Writes are faster than a single drive.
Disadvantages - Uses disk space for parity information. Writes are slower than concat and mirrors.

RAID 0+1 - Stripe 'n mirror

This is a number of striped disks which are then mirrored by an identical stripe. It offers the best speed/protection compromise of all the RAID types.

Advantages - Gives you the best mix of speed and protection.
Disadvantages - Requires at least four physical drives, only two of which are usable capacity.

So what is the real desciding factor? It call comes down to cost. How much can you afford to spend? How valuable is your data? How much speed do you need? How good is your RAID controller? What modes does the RAID controller support? (most mobo controllers don't support RAID 5 for example).

For most PCs the disk subsystem isn't the bottleneck so I mirror or stripe and mirror most of the time. Why? I've had several HD failures over the past and I can't be ar*ed to re-install everything when one happens