Windows 7: Raid 5 Slow Transfer Speeds

Hi,

I have read somewhere that Raid 5 is not supported in Windows 7. Is this true please?

After my near loss of data today I rebuilt my Raid to 5 with three Seagate Barracuda hard drives each at 2 TB. All are 7200 RPM speed and I am copying back my data from a new 3 TB Seagate Hard drive which is also 7200 RPM on Windows 7 X64 but the transfer speeds are down to 30 odd MB/S which is rubbish. When I backed up files to the 3 TB drive I was getting transfer rates of about 130 MB/S.

Is it because it is Raid 5 and it has to spread the files over the 3 drives? My motherboard is EvGA 680i which is very fast normally. My C drive is an OCZ 256 MB SSD and I have 8 Gig of RAM on a Intel 9400 quad core so spec's are good.

If it is the Raid 5 then I might buy a raid controller to slot into the PCIE slot as that would be quicker. I want Raid 5 because if one drive goes down I can remove and replace without loss of data.

Thanks for loking.

I have switched to a strip raid and backed up to another drive and that has increased transfer speeds to over 130 Mb/S

RAID 5 has built-in redundancy, but unfortunately, no speed increases. It writes a parity bit across the 3 drives that it can rebuild the array from if one ever fails. Rebuilding RAID arrays isn't a fast process anyway you go.