raid 5 on np9270 / p270wm ; viable?

Ive been doing some searching when deciding whether or not to get raid on the upcoming np9270. From what I've gathered about raid 5, it is not as optimal as raid 0 but does have redundancy so one wouldn't lose their data over a hdd/ssd malfunction.

Basic knowledge aside, I also read that raid 5 isn't a good option unless you have a dedicated raid card with cache. Would anyone know if raid 5 is worth pursuing in this laptop model?

Thanks in advance

 

Sure it is. How many drives are you looking at? 3 or 4?

Also, you'll need to consider what drives you configure. For example, the Momentus XTs have reportedly had problems working in a RAID-5 volume. It'd be interesting to see what a RAID-5 SSD would look like. wwoods (another x7200 owner) has some first hand experience, I'll ask him to chime in.

In any case, since the P270WM is not out, all we can do is judge on the x7200. And, for the x7200, the numbers are decent, but not fantastic. Depending on the drives, they should be a bit better than a single stand-alone drive with large sequential writes, but worse than RAID 0. For the smaller sized data, RAID-5 will be slower than the single drive due to checksum computation occurring on the CPU. The overhead req'd to compute that checksum can eat a little bit of the performance you gain by splitting the data over multiple disks.

Also note, it is not 100% redundant. if you lose two drives, you'll lose the RAID-5 volume as well. But those odds are ~2x than losing just a single drive.

 

The options I were considering were:
2x Intel 520 120gb ssds in r0 with a 500gb internal hdd for storage/backup
3x " " 80gb ssds in r5
1x " " 240gb ssd with 2x 500gb hdds in r0

This laptop would be for personal use such as video games and some hobby chasing, video/pic editing. Me being indecisive, a second opinion would be most welcome.

 

I'd personally go with the last option. SSD's still aren't cut out for RAID because of the lack of TRIM support. Plus the gains for most real world tasks are going to be minimal over a single SSD. If you keep regular backups of your important data, it's not really necessary to go with a RAID solution that uses redundant disks (that way you don't have to lose a whole harddrive worth of capacity). You get the best speed from all the drive and the most capacity with option 3 as well.

 

OK, wellI was asked to pop in. As for Raid on a SSD, I wouldent do it as TRIM is not supported yet in raid config.

Like was said earlier, the XT Momentuss are bad juju in a raid5, been there done that and dident even get a T-Shirt

I have tried every raid config possible in my comp (yes even raid10) though and believe I have the best one for my needs, understand, I am not looking for the fastest, but the one with the best data reliablity/failover. Yes I have a excellent backup strategy, yes I know raid != backup, I get it, but in my work ANY downtime sucks. Yea, I use my beast for work. Now, am I as protected from drive failure as I would like in my current setup, no, if my C drive fails I am screwed, so I would consider a raid1 mirror or SSD's if/when TRIM is supported for my C drive.

There are a few down siders to raid5 you need to consider though, one is the initial time to initialise, it takes a "LONG FREEKING TIME(tm)", and I am not kidding, also in case of a re-build needed or in the case of a bad shutdown, you will need to do a verify (its automatic, not your choice and cant be canceled), it also takes a LONG FREEKING TIME(tm). While this is happening, performance slows to a crawl, a slow crawl.

So there are a few trade offs. Raid5 does offer decent speed (not raid0 but not as slow as raid1), good protection and good use of disk space (not waisting space like in a mirror), down side: Initialisation, rebuild time, and verification time is LONG and slows performance.

As for raid5 being a "good" option or not, thats something you need to decide. I may go back to raid5 for my D drive if I run into space issues. Like I said its a trade off, raid5 offers a lot, but also does have rebuild time/initialise time/verify time issues.

I am generally not moitoring this thread, so may not see your or anyone's reply, hope this sheds a bit of light on the subject for you. Anything else I can answer, let me know.

If youre looking for numbers, check my posts, I have posted numbers all over in them.

 

Thanks for everyone's input.

Decided on the 240 ssd and 2x 500 hdd in r0.

 

Inopiquez,

Making sure you're aware of the news - http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...evo-p270wm-owners-lounge-131.html#post8492367

 

Yea, I saw that this morning...

Now my options are wait a year, or settle for a p170hm....
I'm not a fan of alienware either.