SSD caching or hybrid drive?

suitheist

suitheist

suitheist

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19 May 2011
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I'm looking to set up some fast storage in my pc and two options come to mind:

1) get a couple of normal high capacity hhds in raid 0 (2x 2gb) and add a small cheap SSD as cache (30/60gb last gen I'd guess).

2) get a couple of momentus xts in raid 0 (2x 500gb)

I don't know whether it's possible to use SSD caching with raided drives, but if it is, would this be the faster route? It would certainly be much cheaper by comparison as capacity increases. Would the size of the SSD need to increase as the size of the HDD array increased? So is a 60gb better than 30gb for larger sizes?
 
you only get 4gb of flash per xt, should work under raid as it is controlled by the drive firmware I believe, I think the 2x2tb (I'm sure you mean TB as this isn't 1998 ;) ).

What files are you looking at caching though if its all movies and the like you wont see much benefit. If you are looking at fast boot times the SSD cache will help a bit but nowhere near as good as a 60gb drive dedicated to OS/Programs and a few games. There is also little point in raid0 if you are just hosting media IMHO anyway.
 
I have my media on a NAS drive atm, which plays fine over my network, but seems painfully slow for moving files back and forth from my pc and I'm a bit concerned that I have everything in there without a backup. So if I move everything to a new internal drive and have the NAS back it up, that should resolve both problems.

In terms of speed, my intention was also to have a separate SSD as a boot drive but I felt that, cost/size being what it is, I would need a second solution for any less used games/programs which don't fit on the SSD but which I also wanted to keep fast.

Is it pointless to cache or raid 0 for this kind of usage? Maybe I'd be better off with a larger SSD which can hold all my programs and OS and one 2TB HDD to resolve the above issues?
 
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hmmm Your NAS bandwidth should far outseed your hard drive speeds unless there is a bottleneck on your network of 100base-t (say a 100mb router or network lead) or if you ahve a wireless solution in place anywhere between your main system and your NAS.

There are a few reviews comparing the Intel cache system against a SSD, I only scanned but I believe the baseline was "It helps but it doesn't really touch an SSD for performance. Have a look for a few reviews and see if it meets your expectations.

As for the SSD, Oh they are fast :P but slightly problematic for the moment, you are looking at £140 for say a 120gb Corsair Force 3 or OCZ Agility 3, for all intent and purposes they are the same drive. It may actually be worth waiting a few months to save yourself the hassle of updating the firmware (with the SandForce based drives at any rate)

I can't say for sure if caching will work with raided mechanical HDDs but I don't see why not, I hope someone else may be able to help you with that one. It does seem unnecessary though to use both caching AND Raid0 for media files like Movies/TV/Music etc, these kinds of files don't need fast read speeds and I would favour the redundancy of Raid1 rather than the speed and destructiveness (however unlikely) of Raid0.
 
Having looked at the reviews, I think I'm going to restrain my urge to try every new tech that comes out and go for a 120gb SSD which should hold all my programs and two 1TB HDDs in raid 0 for storage, backing up to my NAS.

In terms of the SSD, since I'm not intending to have any music/video on it and so don't need to worry about incompressible file speeds, presumably an asynchronous drive would be fine for me? The Force 3 looks a decent price at this size. My only concern is the hardocp article referenced on this forum in the 'synchronous vs asynchronous' thread (which I see you posted in). As I said in that thread, no one else seems to be making that claim from what I can tell. Have you noticed any performance drop on yours since you started to fill it up?
 
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TheMorningStar said:
hmmm Your NAS bandwidth should far outseed your hard drive speeds unless there is a bottleneck on your network of 100base-t (say a 100mb router or network lead) or if you ahve a wireless solution in place anywhere between your main system and your NAS.
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Unless you're running 10gbit ethernet, then a NAS will probably be slower.
 
suitheist said:
Having looked at the reviews, I think I'm going to restrain my urge to try every new tech that comes out and go for a 120gb SSD which should hold all my programs and two 1TB HDDs in raid 0 for storage, backing up to my NAS.
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RAID0 for storage? IMO a bad idea even if you are backing up to your NAS.
 
dont use raid 0 for storage

i just got a ssd and i really love the speed :D, kingston 96gb one, which isnt a particulary fast one either

id recommend samsung hard drives. maybe get a ssd, a 1tb 7200rpm, and a 2tb 5400rpm drive ?
 
I ought really to have said 'which should hold *most* of my programs'. I currently have 152 gb of games/programs, so I'm going to go a little bit over even if I get a 120gb SSD. I imagine it will continue to grow. So maybe then, one 120gb SSD, two 320gb samsung F4 in raid 0, one 2TB storage drive of choice?

OCUK doesn't sell the samsung anymore for some reason, but the one I bought when I built my system is decent. I've spotted one on eBay for £25, so might do that. Any criteria for picking a storage drive? Eco friendly bc it won't be spinning up that much?
 
suitheist said:
Having looked at the reviews, I think I'm going to restrain my urge to try every new tech that comes out and go for a 120gb SSD which should hold all my programs and two 1TB HDDs in raid 0 for storage, backing up to my NAS.

In terms of the SSD, since I'm not intending to have any music/video on it and so don't need to worry about incompressible file speeds, presumably an asynchronous drive would be fine for me? The Force 3 looks a decent price at this size. My only concern is the hardocp article referenced on this forum in the 'synchronous vs asynchronous' thread (which I see you posted in). As I said in that thread, no one else seems to be making that claim from what I can tell. Have you noticed any performance drop on yours since you started to fill it up?
Click to expand...

Well as soon as data hits the drive it gets slower. Most if not all review sites are benchmarking empty drives. This 120gb force 3 of mine is pretty sweet but it still has issues.. but so do all sandforce drives. My amd chipset is nowhere near as fast as the newer intel ones either so they have better performance there. As for sync vs async my drive was £140 and the gt version is £180-£185. So I went for the cheaper as from what I hear very little diference can be seen outside of beanchmarking. I have felt these issues myself bye. the so called "soft hang" and the odd bsod, it could be a few months until they iron out the bugs.


suitheist said:
I ought really to have said 'which should hold *most* of my programs'. I currently have 152 gb of games/programs, so I'm going to go a little bit over even if I get a 120gb SSD. I imagine it will continue to grow. So maybe then, one 120gb SSD, two 320gb samsung F4 in raid 0, one 2TB storage drive of choice?

OCUK doesn't sell the samsung anymore for some reason, but the one I bought when I built my system is decent. I've spotted one on eBay for £25, so might do that. Any criteria for picking a storage drive? Eco friendly bc it won't be spinning up that much?
Click to expand...

Also the thing with SSDs is you don't fill them fully :P Well... some say its a bad idea, if the data is fairly stable i don't really see why not. but i wont be filling over 100gb of my available 111.8gb. you could get a 120 now and another 120 later or a 240 but then you really are looking at big money. Oh and I love the WD greens only time i ever get a problem is when my auto defrag kicks in once a month and i occasionally get hit with a stutter fest while watching a movie or whatever, same could be true of a faster drive too though.
 
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Ok, in that case i dont think I'll worry too much about the filling up issue, but more than about 120gb is probably unrealistic in budget terms. I think I will see how I feel about that capacity before I try SRT, but it's interesting that you can cut the drive up and do both if you want to.

Well, I bought the samsung, since it was so cheap and they seem to be disappearing.

For the SSD I'm looking at the vertex 3, force gt and hyper x. I think I'm willing to pay about £200 at an absolute max, so they look the right sort of spec; though according to reviews they all seem to be very similar with minor advantages in slightly different areas so it's hard to pick one. For a boot drive am I mainly looking for response times as the most important statistic, rather than pure read/writes?

Also how do the patriot wildfire and mushkin chronos deluxe look? They have toggle memory apparently, but from the toms hardware sand force roundup (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sf-2200-sandforce-ssd,2987.html) they seem to have a quite different performance profile from the others. The mushkin has the highest quoted stats of any of them (560 read, 520 write, 90k iops), but no one seems to have given it a dedicated review. Anyone tried one of these?
 
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