Keep RAID 0 or change to a fast single drive?

Inaharry

Inaharry

Inaharry

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Joined
3 Aug 2004
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252
Hi,

I bought 2 x WD 1TB Blacks last year because the 2TBs were going to be out of stock for a while and put them in RAID 0 to get 2TB. I mainly keep all of my Steam games on the drive to help loading times as well as some other files like photos etc. I've been concerned about running RAID 0, not only if a drive should fail, but also whether using a RAID driver under Windows 7 x64 affects the performance or TRIM of my M4 SSD.

I've been planning to change them for a bigger drive for a while now, (waiting for the prices to come back down). I've seen a 4TB WD Black drive appear on OcUK, but looking at some reviews, it gets beaten on almost all benchmarks by the Seagate 3TB ST3000DM001 which is much, much cheaper, (and it's currently on offer on TWO).

I'm trying to decide whether to get the Seagate over the WD Black, but my main concern is the 1 year warranty on the Seagate compared to the 5 year warranty on the WD. I understand that there's a premium having a 4TB drive and for the warranty, but I wondered what everybody else thinks?

Should I pay a premium and get the 4TB WD Black or get the Seagate 3TB and hope it's reliable? Also, is it worth considering getting 2 x Seagates and using RAID 0 again because the benchmarks for that configuration are really impressive or am I better off with 1 drive and sticking with using the AHCI driver rather than RAID with an SSD in the system?

Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks! :)
 
raid wont affect the performance of your ssd,ahci and raid are the same as in they contain the same drivers

its upto you whether you value your data over performance otherwise id stick to what you have

even 3 and 4tb drives can fail and thats a lot of data to lose
 
Thanks wazza300, I've just bought the Seagate 3TB from OcUK so I can move less important stuff to it and downloads etc. That way I can free up the space on the WD RAID for Steam games and still have loads of storage available on the 3TB.
 
I've been running raid0 for 6 years now through 2 motherboards & its never missed a beat. Although I would not dare raid a Seagate after having 3 external Seagates fail within a year + their warranty demands you post it abroad, so useless.
4x Hitachi 80gb 7200, even had to edit their firmware years ago to work in sata2. Back in the day when 80gb was a lot. lol

Granted, their performance in comparison these days is probably not quite as fast as a single sata2 ssd, but for years ive always been the first to load in a multiplayer game :D
 
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