Advise please, RAID0 or SSD price/performance

d_brennen · 1 Aug 2009 at 16:50

I have had a good search around but have been unable to get my head around this one. I want to get some storage for my main PC in time for the full version of Win 7 - the 2 F1s I have are being pensioned off to a NAS box while the Sandisk SSD is going to my beloved Lenovo S10e netbook.

Should I either get a good SSD (aren't they a bit overpriced?) or 2/3 fast hard disks for RAID0? Storage space is not a primary concern, though 32, 64 and even 128GB is a bit limp... I was thinking getting some 500GB Seagate 7200.12 (OCUK has them at £38 odd). What sort of read rate would 2/3 of them have? Short stroked?

My motherboard is a Biostar TF7150U-M7, while nothing special it is stable as a rock and hasn't complained about oc'ing at all. Is the onboard controller up to it?

StevenG · 1 Aug 2009 at 21:08

this is my 3x500gb 7200.12 drives with a 250gb raid0 setup for my os

read of around 300 and write of about 250

StevenG

d_brennen · 2 Aug 2009 at 02:34

Thanks StevenG,

So 300MBs read and 250 write, thats as good as any SSD surely? Appart from seek time? Which has little real world impact?

Nate Silvers · 2 Aug 2009 at 03:00

raid0 is faster than ssd? :confused:

JonJ678 · 2 Aug 2009 at 03:24

d_brennen said:
Appart from seek time? Which has little real world impact?

Seek time is the only reason raptors cost so much. It means enormous amounts in real world usage. People even foolishly claim it's all that matters. It's clearly not, but its the difference between a quick system and a responsive, quick system.

The choice is simple. If you *must* have a 500gb operating system drive, it's raid 0 of hard drives for you. if, after thinking about it for a bit, you realise that 30 or 60gb is more than enough, a single ssd is the way forward.

SSDs win on price/performance, but get slaughtered on price/gb

StevenG · 2 Aug 2009 at 09:15

my setup is faster read and write than a single ssd. but if you raid0 an ssd to get a decent size os drive you'll soon be smashing those figures.

as has been said above its not just read and write speeds that make a quick system. if you want to read something from different parts of the drive there is a 10-15ms gap between reads so tends to slow down a lot on reading from different parts of the drive.

i'm upgrading to 3xSSD's RAID0 so i'll post up my results of that once its all setup.

StevenG

craptakular · 2 Aug 2009 at 09:20

my RAID 0 2x 64 GB Samsung SSD is awesome!

d_brennen · 2 Aug 2009 at 18:21

JonJ678 said:
if, after thinking about it for a bit, you realise that 30 or 60gb is more than enough, a single ssd is the way forward

I have a 32GB SSD at the moment. It is a slow older model (Sandisk 5000 i think) got it free so not complaining. Haven't had any of that stuttering carry on either! 32GB really isn't enough for a primary drive, neither is 64 or 128GB, for my needs anyhow. I have bundles of secure storage for files and media but I really want to have a fast and large primary for my OS, apps and games.

Is there a performance hit for using more than 2 drives? I'm guessing that it doesn't scale well with each drive added but with these 500GB 7200.12s being £38 on OCUK what the hell!

3 drives is what I am thinking of simply because I have 3 x 3.5" drive bays in my Mini P180