RAID systems on home servers and PC’s has become more common now. While we have been in a period of stubbornly elevated prices (from a historic standpoint), hard drives are always doubling in capacity on a regular cadence and improving performance.

There are several things you need to consider when setting up a RAID system. Will this set be my boot drive? What capacity do I need? How much fault tolerance do I need? What performance do I need?

The answer to these questions determines which RAID configuration you should set up. For my setup, I need fault tolerance and performance. This means I will continue to run RAID 5.

Question is, can I do better? There is software RAID available from Microsoft in Windows 10 called Storage Spaces. Also included with most Intel-based motherboards is a hardware RAID. So which should one choose?

Turns out someone has done the analysis between them, and done a good job too. Long story short, stick to hardware RAID, and RAID 5 is still the fastest and most fault tolerant configuration.

https://foxdeploy.com/2015/10/30/windows-vs-intel-raid-performance-smackdown/

My 3 brand new 4TB 7200rpm drives are about to thank me. 🙂