raid 0 Vs SSD

Which will be fastest? raid 0 or an SSD?

As I already have a Spinpoint, raid 0 will obviously work out cheaper, but would it still be worth the extra £60 to go for a decent MLC SSD, if I'm looking at quick loading times for HD footage?

It's a bit of a toss up. The drive you have has, as far as mechanical drives go, a very dense platter. I think the SSD would be faster. Certainly if you put your OS/programs on the SSD and ensured the page file, browser temp files, save games, documents were on the F1 then I think you'd see better performance.

When you say loading times for HD footage, are you meaning operations on large files like video files etc?

There are other people who are more knowledgeable than me about this, but the "big win" for SSD is their low access time, the raw transfer rate isn't particularly outstanding.

Since load times for HD footage are typically going to be dominated by transfer rate, I'm not sure you'll see much benefit from an SSD in that scenario.

Also, surely you'll need a lot of storage for HD? In which case you're also trading off having 64MB of HD storage (on SSD) v.s. over a TB of disk storage on the Samsungs.

The transfer rates are ample on top end SSD's for HD material.

The question should be what you wish to use the SSD for?

Most people buying SSD currently are using them as system drives because thats where you are going to see the most benefits, boot up times, installing programs and launching apps. I think at this time the cost is too high per Gb to be storing lots of HD material on SSD's.

Idealy in this moment in time, as LeJimster said SSD are perfect for accessing LARGE amounts of data over a high number of files, since access is much faster and the seek time = 0.

Think of it this way, two men can lift a 10kg weight from the floor to a table in 3 seconds each. There are 20 weights to lift and they are spread at varying distances from each other. One man has to run to each one, the other can teleport. Thats the example, same raw power or speed (unless you shell big big bucks) but one darts around the place loading hundreds of things much faster

Keeping with that analogy, handling HD footage is pretty much all about "raw power". So you won't see much benefit with a SSD.

Boot times and application startup is where I'm seeing the big win - this clip pretty much bowled me over:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi4lASDDsJk

particularly at the end with the difference in Microsoft Outlook startup times. On the other hand, I'm hearing people say "don't have the outlook files on the SSD - too many read/write cycles", so...

and installing apps is crazy fast..

almost finished installing everything so i can start using it as my main pc but loading apps on to the SSD / boot times/ apps starting is fantastic

Paul11 said:

and installing apps is crazy fast..

almost finished installing everything so i can start using it as my main pc but loading apps on to the SSD / boot times/ apps starting is fantastic

Click to expand...

Yea it really is blistering fast.

I've got a 64GB SLC and it's my main OS drive, sometimes I wish I had a little more space but i put all non important games (ones I don't play very often) onto my F1 and all games I do play a lot (multiplayer online) on the SSD and the load times are fantastic