2 1tb spinpoint f3s in raid0 vs an ssd

jamiehavok · 19 Apr 2010 at 20:36

hi

i've been thinking about an ssd for a while then i figured with these spinpoint f3s which are really fast (like twice as fast as my old seagate i've got at the moment) i'd be better off spending less on 2 1tb spinpoints, raiding them for almost the same speed as an intel x25 and obvously substantially more storage space. is there any real advantage to getting an ssd (and maybe one spinpoint to replace the seagate) other than it still might be slightly faster, silent and wont slow down over time?

also can someone confirm that its best to select a higher stripe size for gaming and multimedia use when raiding?

thanks in advance.

d_brennen · 19 Apr 2010 at 20:43

Won't be faster in real world terms but would be very fast indeed and offer plenty of space. SSDs are great (though require carfull choice when buying, some are best avoiding) but the tech is still young.

In a couple of years I am sure they will overtake harddrives in the main stream. Those F3s will be a good stop gap IMO, and a far more sensible option than fortune on a current SSD. My opinion, of course

Freddie1980 · 19 Apr 2010 at 21:09

The performance benefits of running hard drives in RAID 0 are dubious at best it's not going to cut down on loading times for Windows, games and other apps like a SDD would.

Simon42 · 19 Apr 2010 at 21:49

A single SSD may not beat the transfer rate of two hard drives in RAID 0 by much (if at all), but it will still be the access times by a huge margin. The effect all depends on how you use on your PC. I use the fast access times of SSD to improve boot times and application load times, but also have hard drives in RAID 0 (largish strip 64 to 128KB) for other storage. I have lots of large files which I put on the RAID 0 for the cost saving and also they benefit from the fast transfer speed more than by access time.

So I would say an SSD is still a luxury given the cost, but if your budget can stretch then it's good to have.

jamiehavok · 20 Apr 2010 at 01:04

hmm ok well i guess ill see a peformance benefit either way my seagate drive really is stupidly slow - like 65 max read sometimes trottling down to like 20 on hdtune! is there any issues i could come across with a raid setup for games and multimedia etc? thanks

uv · 20 Apr 2010 at 07:51

Freddie1980 said:
The performance benefits of running hard drives in RAID 0 are dubious at best

That just isn't correct.

My RAID0 F1's massively reduced load times (in apps, games and windows), and my RAID0 velociraptors saw an increase again over the F1's.

My SSD is still much faster though, even though the sustained read speeds are much lower.

In all fairness, I'd stay away from Samsung drives personally - I've had four die on me, and I have friends who have also had F1's die on them.

jamiehavok · 20 Apr 2010 at 13:45

still unsure which 1 to get think ill just get both i mean if im gona get an ssd and a fast hard drive might as well get another hard drive and raid given the price of regular hard drives! spinpoints seem to get decent reviews gues all hard drives have a fairly high failure chance.

edit pretty much decided i'm going to get a ssd as a boot drive and 2 fast hard drives to raid0 for storage and gamesthat dont fit on the ssd! etc when my overtime at work comes through!

im a little confused about how to setup a raid0 in my p6t deluxe manual there seems to be two instruction sets for raid - 1 that simply says "creating a raid 0 set (striped) and 1 that seems more complicated to set up called "marvell sas raid configurations" which 1 should i be doing? thanks

Simon42 · 20 Apr 2010 at 17:43

jamiehavok said:
im a little confused about how to setup a raid0 in my p6t deluxe manual there seems to be two instruction sets for raid

Depends on what controller you plug the drives into - you've got the standard connectors on the Intel chipset and the Marvell ones. I don't know what the performance is like with the particular Marvell controller you got but I would normally go with the Intel controller.

jamiehavok · 22 Apr 2010 at 19:11

Simon42 said:
Depends on what controller you plug the drives into - you've got the standard connectors on the Intel chipset and the Marvell ones. I don't know what the performance is like with the particular Marvell controller you got but I would normally go with the Intel controller.

ok thanks - anyone got any feedback as to what the marvel controler is like on the p6t deluxe?

uv · 22 Apr 2010 at 19:58

jamiehavok said:
ok thanks - anyone got any feedback as to what the marvel controler is like on the p6t deluxe?

crap.. well, in comparison to the onboard intel.

I use my marvel port for my DVD drive, as the performance difference with HDD's is actually noticeable.