Will 3 Hitach 2TB 5K3000 in RAID 5 perform as fast as 1 2TB 7K3000 drive?

[lsquare]

Right now my workstation is using a SSD and a 2TB 7200 RPM hard drive. I find the hard drive to be a bit too slow for me sometimes. I want a nice balance between noise and performance, but I can't afford a gigantic SSD setup.

So what I have in mind is to either use software RAID 5 and or a dedicated hardware controller with 3 Hitachi 2TB 5K3000 hard drives. I figure the slower access time of the slower RPM drives will be mitigated by the fact that the 3 drives are RAIDed. Is that going to be true? Will access time and sequential transfer speed dramatically improve in a RAID situation?

Thanks!

[supaflyx3]

About the same performance, access time might take a hit, but depending on what you're doing it might not be that much of an issue. I don't find the access time that bad on my 5K3000

[NI3]

What most people see as "fast" is access time, and raiding doesn't improve that. So you will find that for regular desktop use, they will seem slower. For moving data though, they will likely be faster.

Why not buy a second 7k3000 for raid, and an ssd for a boot drive. It will be $10 - $60 more depending on the ssd size.

[MARSTG]

A 3 drives raid 5 matrix offers the performance of two drives in raid 0. So double the max output of a single drive and you have the performance in raid 5. Only output is increased, not the latency.