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1. Re: Best option for RAID 5 with 4 drives?
Alex - DV411 Apr 4, 2013 5:50 PM (in response to Paul Lewis)Hi Paul,
Areca ARC-1320-8i seems like the best option - or a variation of it (like ARC-1320-4i4x) - as long as you get four internal ports. It's right around $300.
That said, some of my clients run Intel RST RAID5 on four drives for some time, and it actually performs well:
(Personally I think software and hybrid RAIDs are the future of RAID technology: much more flexible than hardware RAID; potentially faster as well given that they have access to all of computer resources rather than just a dedicated processor. The latest iteration of RST, for example, allow SSDs for caching of RAID volumes.)
For my personal system, I use a $200 CineRAID H458 box with four Hitachi Deskstars in RAID5, which is a very inexpensive option for an external RAID:
Sure, it's rather slow; fast enough for my purposes though, and is highly portable, unlike any config with an internal RAID controller.
If I need something seriously faster (yet on a budget), I'd use something like this:
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2. Re: Best option for RAID 5 with 4 drives?
Paul Lewis Apr 4, 2013 7:34 PM (in response to Alex - DV411)Hey Alex,
Thanks for the information.
So, do you think that a dedicated controller would be worth the price if I'm only doing a 4 disk raid? How much better do you think a dedicated card would run compared to intel's RST?
Also, What do you think about raid 0 or 1+0 with intel RST? I do daily back-ups, and I'm really only looking for better disk read/write speeds, but a bit of security would be nice to add to the mix. I've got a system at home and at work, and I plan on doing some sort of disk improvement on both and I'm just wondering what options I have.
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3. Re: Best option for RAID 5 with 4 drives?
Alex - DV411 Apr 5, 2013 12:50 PM (in response to Paul Lewis)So, do you think that a dedicated controller would be worth the price if I'm only doing a 4 disk raid? How much better do you think a dedicated card would run compared to intel's RST?
Hardware RAID5 speeds I see in various places (Google is my friend) are right up there with my numbers: 400MB/s reads, 300MB/s writes. If you get similar numbers, I don't see much of a benefit to a hardware RAID controller for a small set like this.
Also, What do you think about raid 0 or 1+0 with intel RST? I do daily back-ups, and I'm really only looking for better disk read/write speeds, but a bit of security would be nice to add to the mix. I've got a system at home and at work, and I plan on doing some sort of disk improvement on both and I'm just wondering what options I have.
RAID10 will be slower than 5, although it's less taxing on drives (one disk write operation per OS request, vs. two with RAID5). I'd go with RAID5: faster, larger per $.




