[Joe]

just like all the raid versions.. there are specific uses for all them.

RAID5 is good for stuff that is mainly read time ( IE: web servers, etc...) But it should not be used in DB servers as the Read/Write lag kills performance.

How are you getting stats on Raid5 that says its write speed is just slightly slower then 0? On a high end SCSI card with megs of ram... Yep thats right. On an IDE card with no ram and no real hardware layer interface ( Most promise cards are all software level)... They will/would SUCK at RAID 5 simply cause there is NO write cache on the car.


1/0 and RAID 3 are favorites for people who have serious Read/Write access and want redundancy. Duplexing is of course the best of all but you have a 50% loss of storrage space. RAID 3 on a nice SCSI card is VERY nice, since you can put all the parity data on one specific drive and have it on its own SCSI channel. that way you dont have to wait for writing parity data to the same platters you are writing your real data on.

Jas, I am not a knowitall... I just have worked on RAID systems in professional settings for roughly 10 years. I am the Anti-RAID5 guy after I have seen how it has screwed up the speed of many DB's and file servers.

Redundancy is nice, but on a home PC should not come at the cost of performance.