RAID 1/0 vs. RAID 5

Posted in 1998

Larry Benoit — Sat, 25 Jul 1998 16:47:56 -0700 — source: Informix-list mailing list archive (1991-1998)

I am about to configure a new Compaq Proliant 3000 with the Compaq 2SL SCSI RAID controller, 128 MB memory, four 4.1 GB UW (10K spindles) drives, SCO Openserver 5.0.4 and Informix Online 5.10 with I-Star. We have about 16 users running Win95 with NewEra 2.2. I plan to configure the four hard drives into two logical stripped drives and mirror the logical drives -- RAID 1/0. This is the configuration for our current Compaq ProSignia 500/SCO Openserver 3.0 running Informix Online 5.03 and thankfully has been 100% reliable for 3 plus years. Disk capacity is not an issue -- our database will not exceed 1GB -- performance and reliability are my primary concern. I will be using raw devices and 64MB of shared memory will be allocated to the database engine. I am inclined to stick with RAID 1/0, but would appreciate any comments regarding performance and reliability of RAID 1/0 versus RAID 5, especially for complex queries.