Best way to set up 2 Hard Drives in a laptop?

[JennyXT]

Hi I'm not all that technical about this stuff but I've been reading up on RAID 0 and RAID 1 and on SSD for the past couple of days.

I'm buying a new laptop which houses 2 x 2.5" HDDs. Just wondering how I can set this up, and what the pros and cons of each way are!!

1) 2 x HD in RAID 0
2) 2 x HD in RAID 1
3) 1 x SSD + 1 x HDD

Is #3 above faster and better solution than #1?
Is RAID 0 only used to enable faster HDD speeds?
If I use #3 can I run this in RAID 0 or RAID 1 for backup purposes?



Thanks for your help!

 

[e36Adz]

2 x SSD hard drives in Raid-0 will probably be the fastest but I'd go for option 3 everytime. One SSD as the primary hdd for windows, which will be fast enough and a second BIG hdd for storage.

 

[Disco Boy]

First you should check to see if your motherboard actually has RAID capabilities. I'm not sure if laptops do. You'll also know from your research that using a chipset's RAID capabilities uses some of the processing power of your CPU whereas a dedicated RAID card (which no laptops have as far as I know) does its own calculations and is faster.

As for your questions.

#3 will be faster than #1 in that the seek times are much faster on SSDs, that's their main advantage. So Windows will be much snappier. As for file transfers (sustained reads) they may be similar speeds, the RAID setup has the advantage of being able to read simultaneously from two drives whereas the SSD is faster than a HDD.

The purpose of RAID 0 is to speed things up, it will double (not quite, but almost) the speed at which files can be read, compared to one HDD. What I mean there is sustained read, e.g. moving a big file from one place to another. The seek times are the same as having one HDD, so much slower than a SSD, hence why SSD drives are really "snappy" and load your OS and programmes more quickly.

You would be foolish to run 1 SSD and 1 HDD in RAID 1 because a RAID 1 array is as big as double the size of the smallest drive. For example if you have a 60gb SSD and a 500gb HDD then your array will be 120gb and 440gb of your HDD will be wasted. Also in RAID arrays you want the drives to be as close in performance to eachother as possible.

I would go with setup #3. Install the OS and programmes and general stuff on the SSD and keep the HDD for storage and backup.

 

[JennyXT]

Thanks for the help.

I understand from readining in other threads here that most of you guys go with #3 (1 SSD for OS and 1 HDD for data)

Do you guys also install all programs on the SSD?

Am I right in assuming that there will be no read/writes to the HDD during normal operation of the laptop unless I e.g. copy something or open a file on the HDD?

 

[KIA]

Do you guys also install all programs on the SSD?

Am I right in assuming that there will be no read/writes to the HDD during normal operation of the laptop unless I e.g. copy something or open a file on the HDD?

I install games & apps on my SSD. It is 128GB in size. Your OS shouldn't read/write to the HDD if it is idle but I wouldn't rule out the occasional read/write.