2 SSD's 64gb in Raid 0 or 1 128Gb as boot/OS drive

The thing that convinced me to buy 120/128Gb drives rather than 60/64's is resale. I sell my stuff every 6 months or so and the bigger drives will hold their value much better, just like smaller RAM sticks are always worth less.
 
WJA96 said:
The thing that convinced me to buy 120/128Gb drives rather than 60/64's is resale. I sell my stuff every 6 months or so and the bigger drives will hold their value much better, just like smaller RAM sticks are always worth less.
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Good point and throw in the 20% better performance of the 128gb drive, the fact you can use trim and there really is little reason to raid two 64gb drives.
 
How about RAID'ing 2 128GB drives though? :D

Assuming money were no object is RAID0'ing SSD drives "worth it" considering you lose TRIM? (I'm still partially obsessing over how relevant TRIM is - I kinda like the idea of Windows 7 knowing that a SSD is connected and doing whatever it is programmed to do to improve performance/longevity, instead of it just seeing it as a generic "blob" of HDD space)
 
Durzel said:
How about RAID'ing 2 128GB drives though? :D

Assuming money were no object is RAID0'ing SSD drives "worth it" considering you lose TRIM? (I'm still partially obsessing over how relevant TRIM is - I kinda like the idea of Windows 7 knowing that a SSD is connected and doing whatever it is programmed to do to improve performance/longevity, instead of it just seeing it as a generic "blob" of HDD space)
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IMO raiding only gives you higher sequential read/writes and in actual fact slower access times and slower random read/writes (doesn't really matter with ssd's as they are so fast anyway) so only worth raiding ssd's if they are large and you are going to put everything on. Just my two pennies worth.
 
Durzel you've just shot the cost up by 200 quid! :eek:

Some may query real world benefits and return for layout on RAIDing SSD's, but provided it's within a given person's budget, then it's nice to know you're working/playing on an optimised system. I for one have the geek within me (being a software developer for last 15 years contributes!), and SSD's werent around the last time I built a system 5 years ago. For me its certainly the most exciting single product Im putting into my new builds, so its a temptation to take this technology onboard my new systems as far as my pennies allow.

Got a lot to learn with all talk of TRIM and wipers, but this forum has been a GREAT resource with all you guys forging ahead with your SSD installations ahead of me, thanks!
 
^^^ There's definitely tangible benefits to RAID0'ing regular HDDs, but SSDs aren't regular HDDs and I've read in several places that they require some level of management (either automated or manual) to keep them operating at peak performance. The question really is whether the advantages of RAID0'ing them offsets whatever you lose from turning them into a single generic HDD blob (as far as Windows is concerned).

I was toying with the idea of buying 2 of the Intel 160GBs when they come back into stock and sticking Windows 7, apps & games on them.

I could just as easily keep them seperate if there is likely to be negligible difference or strong positive benefits from doing so (e.g. this TRIM stuff).
 
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Durzel,

I guess that's the question, of pro's and cons on RAIDing the SSDs - is the pro of combined SSDs for super access times worth any manual maintenance "pain" or real incremental loss of performance over time. Im not in a position to clarify/state the "cons" of RAID ssd, and whether firmware/software will mature to reduce/eliminate these in the near future. Hmmm.
 
Durzel, get one drive to start with...you'll see an improvement over RAID0 raptors - if you don't think it's fast enough for you, get another drive later on (hopefully the price will have come down too!).

Anyway that's what I'm doing - I don't see the pros and cons that big a deal. If performance on an unsupported SSD RAID for trim gets that bad, I'll just reformat and re-install - quickly ;)
 
ChileanLlama said:
Durzel, get one drive to start with...you'll see an improvement over RAID0 raptors - if you don't think it's fast enough for you, get another drive later on (hopefully the price will have come down too!).

Anyway that's what I'm doing - I don't see the pros and cons that big a deal. If performance on an unsupported SSD RAID for trim gets that bad, I'll just reformat and re-install - quickly ;)
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Yeah that sounds like a good idea the more I think about it. My motherboard & CPU are getting on for 4 years old now (ICH7R + Core 2 Duo) so in all likelihood I'd probably run into serious problems trying to RAID SSD drives on the onboard controller, or at least serious performance problems.

I'm leaning towards getting a single 160GB Intel for Windows, apps + primary games and a 2nd 150GB Velociraptor for other games and just running it in AHCI mode.

Thanks a lot and sorry to the OP for the mild thread hijack.
 
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Hmmm, buying the VRaptor seems like a waste of money in the long run? The £120ish is almost half way to another 160gb x25 - so if you need that sort of space might be better after all to get 2xSSDs or a bigger one? What about an Indilinx based 256gb drive or wait for the 320gb Intel?
 
Greebo said:
IMO raiding only gives you higher sequential read/writes and in actual fact slower access times and slower random read/writes (doesn't really matter with ssd's as they are so fast anyway) so only worth raiding ssd's if they are large and you are going to put everything on. Just my two pennies worth.
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For what it is worth this is not my experience. Using two 160gb g2 intels in raid 0 I get gains accross the board vs a single drive, including in random 4k writes. Reads are pretty much similar between single and dual raided.
 
ChileanLlama said:
Hmmm, buying the VRaptor seems like a waste of money in the long run? The £120ish is almost half way to another 160gb x25 - so if you need that sort of space might be better after all to get 2xSSDs or a bigger one? What about an Indilinx based 256gb drive or wait for the 320gb Intel?
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I don't really need the additional space as such, it would just be nice to be able to put some more games on faster storage (currently I have about 7 or 8 games on a partition off a regular WD 500GB drive).

Also £115 vs £333 is a pretty significant price difference.

e: Also I can't really wait for 320GB+ or whatever because my PC is currently dead due to the Raptor array failing.
 
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B**ger, just noticed OcUK have just upped the pre-order price on 64Gb and 128Gb Crucial M225 SSDs - and I havent pre-ordered yet, they couldnt tell me this morning when they expected delivery.... :(
 
Greebo said:
IMO raiding only gives you higher sequential read/writes and in actual fact slower access times and slower random read/writes (doesn't really matter with ssd's as they are so fast anyway) so only worth raiding ssd's if they are large and you are going to put everything on. Just my two pennies worth.
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why would you get slower random read and writes?

People think that when a file is too small it won't be faster because the file isn't spread across two drives, sure thats true, but we're about a million years past where we send one request for data at a time. You can request more than one file at a time, multiple files, when they are on alternate drives in the raid array, speed increases. likewise iops for small files increases because if you have 2000 small files to read, both drives are reading them instead of one, if iops for files size x is 100per second, then its going to take 20 seconds to access them on one drive, or 10 seconds with two drives accessing 1000 each at 100iops each.

Raid 0 IS faster with ssd's in exactly the same ways as they are in mechanical hdd's, all the reasons its faster are the same and they scale just as well in raid.

Saturating a decent controller would be hard with two drives, but the biggest gains are in increased iops and increased read/writes in random speeds which aren't effected by lack of controller bandwidth.

My two sammy 64's, aren't great but WERE cheap, they get around 9mb/s in 4kb random write which isn't far off a single crucial 64gb, considering thats the 1st gen samsung controller which is even worse than the 2nd gen sammy controller thats actually a very good speed and VERY good scaling at all speed points read and write from raid. everything is increased, including iops, when using two ssd's in raid.

Having said that, I'm stilling thinking of getting a single crucial because frankly, its fast enough as a single drive, plus I could do with a couple semi decent 64gb ssd's for laptops.
 
ChileanLlama said:
Durzel, get one drive to start with...you'll see an improvement over RAID0 raptors - if you don't think it's fast enough for you, get another drive later on (hopefully the price will have come down too!).

Anyway that's what I'm doing - I don't see the pros and cons that big a deal. If performance on an unsupported SSD RAID for trim gets that bad, I'll just reformat and re-install - quickly ;)
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This is pretty much what I did - started with 2 x 30Gb Vertex's since the 60Gb weren't in stock at the time and then added the third seeing as the performance blew me away and I decided that I wanted all my Apps/Games to be running off the SSD's and the 60Gb capacity simply wasn't enough. I have been running this array for over 4 months now and have not noticed any appreciable slowdown and hence haven't missed the ability to use the TRIM tool due to them being raided. If you keep an image then re-installing is literally a few minutes work should you need to do it.

As has also been said though OCZ are working on a 'Garbage Collection' routine which will be released as part of a future firmware and hence will run independant of OS & Controller and thus will enable a TRIM like ability on all their drives regardless of configuration or usage.

If you are coming to SSD's as a new user then I would recommend getting the single largest drive that you can reasonably afford as although there are some benefits to RAID 0 SSD arrays they are less appreciable than for regular HDD's - and the simplicity and TRIM-ability of a single drive setup can be more valuable to the new user. If you already have an SSD and need more capacity then adding another in a RAID array is usually the cheapest upgrade path.
 
Thanks a lot.

I was debating going for the Intel 160GB SSD but I'm leaning towards the Crucial 256GB M225... not quite as fast but as a intro to SSDs I'm sure it will be capable enough. Shame neither of them are in stock though. :(
 
Ive gone and ordered a Crucial 128Gb, just playing the waiting game for stock now. Like you Durzel Im gonna see how I get on with one and can always add another later.

Roll on delivery!
 
You're gonna love it!

I recently won a 120Gb Vertex at auction and put it into my laptop - but tbh now I'm thinking I might put it into my main desktop as a single drive and then put a single 30Gb from my current desktop array into the lappy (as it's mainly used for browsing anyway and running Win7 so a lighter load than Vista too!) then sell on the other two 30Gb Vertex's - prob on the MM.

I suspect that I'm not gonna notice much difference, other than having more capacity on my main rig where it's really needed! :)
 
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