SATA Raid 5 Setups Explored

Having a SATA raid 5 setup in a computer can be both a great thing, as well as a terrible thing. They key to making this setup work is research and knowing what options you want as a computer user.

First, let's take a look at exactly what a SATA raid 5 is. Just like any raid 5 setup, this will require a minimum of 3 drives, and a maximum only limited by the control, or ports on your raid 5 setup. A raid 5 setup is beneficial in a couple of ways. You gain speed as the information is spanned across however many drives you have in your volume.

You also gain redundancy in a SATA raid 5 setup. One drive in a raid 5 can fail, and you lose no information. This does come at a cost however, you will lose the equivalant of one hard drive of space for this function. If a drive fails, you simply replace the drive with one of the same size or bigger, then rebuild the raid set. During this time system performance will be slow until the rebuild is finished.

1	2	3	4
C	D	D	D
D	D	D	C
D	D	C	D
D	C	D	D

How does it work? It's actually a simple concept, let's say you have 4 hard drives in your raid 5 setup. We'll use the table to the right here to illustrate what is happening. The numbers at the top of the table represent the hard drives. D stands for Data, and C stands for Calculation. As you can see, any one drive can fail and the raid setup can be rebuilt after the drive is replaced simply by calculating the missing piece of the puzzle.

TIP! For maximum performance, a separate controller that has it's own hardware to perform the calculation otherwise the result will be really slow write times.

I've tried a hardware SATA raid 5 using 3 drives setup through the BIOS of the motherboard. Sad to say, motherboards currently just don't handle this well, it's more of a software based raid and the performance left my computer feeling very sluggish.

There is good news though. For those of you reading this page, it already means you are expecting to buy multiple drives, instead of setting up a raid 5 without the proper hardware controller, or overpaying to get one, let's look at a different setup that not only gives redundancy but performance.

The current setup I use is a raid stripe, or raid 0 setup with 2 drives, then use a 3rd drive for my redundancy. There is simply a folder structure on my raid 0 volume that has all of my data, this I use daily and gives me a ton of performance since it's striped. The other drive is simply a copy of this backup folder structure. To backup, simply copy and paste modified or missing files into your structure weekly and you've got a seriously fast hard drive for reads and writes, plus if your raid 0 fails on you, you've still got your backup so nothing is lost.

TIP! I use the command xcopy C:\location\*.* d:\ /d /e /v /y /h in a batch file to do my backup to my non raid 0 drive. To use it, simply replace location with your source folder of what you want to backup, and replace d:\ with the drive letter you'd like to backup too. This will copy only modified files and new files in the same folder structure.

If performance isn't that critical, a raid 5 is a great option. The read speeds are still fast, it's just the writes that you'll notice will suffer in speed but, you do get the security of being able to have a drive fail without having to reinstall Windows or any of your programs. You simply replace the drive, rebuild the raid and continue to work, even while the raid is being rebuilt.

Go from SATA Raid 5 to Build A Gaming Computer
Learn how to build your own computer