Hi Everyone...

I need an advice about RAID setup.
I am planning to go for a raid setup, but have not decide yet in which configuration, or if it is relevant for me. I am dealing with data processing and my data files are around 3-5 GB. And I need fast data access time for a better processing, I am running a 4Ghz overclocked i7 cpu but my hard drive suffers from speed.

Currently I am using a Samsung HD103SJ 1TB drive, I know the best solution is to go for a SSD but I can't afford it right now. So i am looking for a cheaper way to increase the speed.

I might be able to buy 4x 500GB drives or another HD103SJ for a raid configuration, can you give me advice and comments about the configuration that might be achieve and the improvements that U might have.

Thanks,
B

The 4 x 500gb drives would allow you to set up a 1.5TB RAID 5 setup. This would give you a boost in the read/write performance over individual disks and a certain measure of fault tolerance should one drive fail. However, as I recommend to anyone with any type of RAID array, make certain you backup your data religiously. A RAID data recovery will cost an arm and a leg (and maybe another arm). Avoid RAID 0 setups.

Raid 10 would be my choice with 4 drives. It will give you both speed and redundancy at the cost of capacity.

The 4x500's will turn into 1GB of available space, however: You don't need an expensive RAID card for RAID10 unlike RAID5 (RAID 5 needs to calculate the parity, and will be slow if there is no hardware XOR on the card)

Drawbacks: RAID 10 cuts the total capacity in half. (8x500GB drives gives you 4x500GB logical capacity). RAID5 can be expanded to as many hard drives as you want, and you only lose the capacity of 1 drive in the array (8x500GB drives gives you 7x500GB logical capacity) Understand that when one drive fails and the RAID starts rebuilding, the likelihood of a second drive failing during the rebuild goes up with the number of drives in the array.