What performs better? 3 hard disks in a RAID 5 or a single disk with no RAID ?
reads are faster in raid5, but writes are (typically) faster to non-raid5. Or that's the "common knowledge" anyways.
No doubt there are scenarios (like linear/serial data) where single disk reads could be faster
brycec: writes are faster in raid 5 too
it's random acceess that can be faster in raid 10
mnathani: mdadm raid10 far 2 or raidz
is good performance with 3 disks
but generally speaking, you're not going to get much faster performance except for linear read/writes
as often you're bound by serialisation, and access time delays.
i suppose that's quite a general answer, if you have lots of simultaneous access then raid10 near, of offset is faster it hink