Originally posted by: RDMustang1
Originally posted by: kimchee411
Damn, the Dell deal is making me stingy. $124 + tax = ~ $136 = 28% > the $106 I got my last 2 for. Hey Bobartig, why RAID 10 instead of RAID 5? Just curious.
Raid 10 has a lot better performance and can lose more drives and still remain operational without losing data. Of course the extras are costly with eating up 1/2 the space instead of 1 drive with RAID5.
What kind of performance does your application require? RAID 5 has better read performance as it is striped across more disks. Write performance sucks because of the parity calculations. If you're building a media server, for example, RAID 5 would probably be better, provided your OS doesn't reside on that array, especially since you're dealing with large files and a lot of sequential reads. Then again with 4 drives, the advantage with reads is minimal while the write performance of RAID 10 is far better.
As for redundancy, you could keep a hot spare for your RAID 5 array while gaining an extra 1.5 TB over RAID 10 in a 4 drive setup. It's also pretty damn rare for 2 drives to fail simultaneously, or before the array can be rebuilt when the bad drive is replaced (of course it takes a really long time to rebuild an array when you're dealing with drives this big).
Personally I use these drives to store massive amounts of data, and performance isn't really a factor, so I like to maximize the capacity. The performance of a 7200 RPM SATA disk isn't so good anyway so I use a small Raptor, SAS disk, or SSD for the OS and apps.