Help with Hard Drive / Raid Question pls

[Angellus]

.

 

[Drake2007]

Theoretically read speeds improve, it's write that slows down.. so choose your poison, have you looked into RAID5?

 

[shogun]

RAID 5 is slower for reads and writes... but will you really notice it?

 

[Conradl]

RAID 5 is slower for reads and writes... but will you really notice it?

Be careful of statements such as RAID X is slow. It really is dependent on several factors. RAID0 on anything but a system disk that you are prepared to rebuild is really not a good idea. If you have any data that you want to keep, rather use a single disk, or RAID1/5 (RAID0 increases the chance of you loosing data!). Below is a post from a previous thread I wrote; don't feel like typing it again

General rule of thumb is that increasing the number of physical disks will always increase IOs (assuming you use Hardware RAID). The challenge is that there are generally four types of IO: Random Read/Write and Sequential Read/Write. Certain RAID levels offer different benefits depending on the type of IO.

There there are also different benefits for different types of IO depending on the block size. So Sequential writes using a small block size will be different to Random writes using a small block size.

So for my 1 Million Pands, IOs will be increased by using more physical disks - you may however not see any benefit depending on what you do. If your multitasking entails opening the office suite and changing between windows, then you would see little benefit once all the apps were open.

The table below does not format well


Significantly Random Significantly Sequential
Block Size Read Write Read Write
Small
(<32 KiB ) 1/10, 5, 6 1/10 1/10, 5, 6 1/10, 5
Medium
(Between 32
and 256 KiB) 1/10, 5, 6 1/10 1/10, 5, 6 5
Large
(>256 KiB) 1/10, 5, 6 1/10 1/10, 5, 6 5