Large single SSD or 2x smaller RAID 0?

Jed Shields

Jed Shields

Jed Shields

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Hi guys,

now that SSD's are dropping in price I was thinking of either selling my Crucial M4 256Gb SSD and getting a 512, or buying another 256 and run it in RAID 0. I've read some good things about performance in RAID 0, especially for gaming, but I remember there being issues a while back with lack of TRIM etc. Is this still a problem?

Currently I have Win 7 64 Pro, programs and games on my SSD drive, data and media on my standard drives. I'm running out of room on the SSD drive and so some of my games are on the slower drives.

What would you recommend?

Cheers,

Jed.
 
Raid 0 effectively doubles your speed (in theory).

Will you notice it? Maybe not.

I mean the biggest gain is going from mechincal to ssd. Would it matter that a game might load in 6 secs on ssd in raid versus 12 secs on a non raided one when it used to be a minute on the mechancial drive?

afik Trim still isn't fixed on raided drives.

So maybe just best adding another 256 and put your games on that?

512 seem very expensive as in they cost way more than two 256gb drives.
 
Greebo said:
512 seem very expensive as in they cost way more than two 256gb drives.
Click to expand...

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=2104&sortby=nameAsc&subid=&mfrid=30

Crucial M4 256 = £167
Crucial M4 512 = £315

512 is slightly cheaper than 2x 256. However, if I sell my 256 I'll be taking a slight hit, so buying a new 512 would cost more than getting a second 256. Either way I'll have 512Mb of storage and be able to move all my games onto SSD, not just some of them. So what's the better solution?
 
Personally unless really bothered about those few extra seconds saved loading games I would not take the hit on selling your existing ssd and just buy another 256mb one and not bother putting them in raid and just load your games up on the 2nd drive.

If you do decide that though, then you could get the cheaper (and superior?) samsung for £144 and save yourself £23???

I have almost done a similar thing. I have two vertex 60gb drives in raid 0 and now adding a single 256mb drive as I am out of space.

Did consider buying two of them and selling my existing drives (not for much money, granted) but not really worth the extra effort and money and I think I will be happy moving all my games onto the new drive.
 
What's the problem with not having TRIM, I don't fully understand it. I've also read something about Crucial having Garbage Control(?) which is something similar?
 
Well from my experience when I used to be bothered and ran benchmarks etc, ssd drives can slow down over time. You can of course, if you have another drive to boot up from or usb stick, break your raid, run the utlity cleanup program on each drive and then put your raid back together and both drives will be back to peak performance. Also seem to think you can't flash new firmware while they are in raid either.

I have done this a few times but haven't done it for almost 9 months now as it's a pain in the backside to do tbh.

Which probably means that if I benchmarked my drives tonight I would perhaps see only 300 to 400 mb/sec compared to the 575ish when they were new. Am I bothered? not really. In real life, as you know, that speeds from even slightly crippled drives like that is still way faster than a mechanical drive.

My new samsung ssd has arrived today so I think I'll clone my windows onto it, break my raid drives, flash with latest firmware, run the cleanup programs on them, put them back to raid 0 and clone my windows back onto them and then add the 256gb new ssd as my games drive.

I have another 3 Tb of mechanical drives for music/film storage anyway.

Tbh I only went down the raid route for the extra speed as I only have sata 2 and now you get ssd drives which match my raided drives as single drives plus it was cheaper to buy two 60gb ssd drives than one 120gb drive when I bought mine.
 
raid 0 doesn't improve performance in all situations. it also eats cpu cycles if using onboard raid. reinstalling will be a pain if something goes wrong. power consumption rises. security is decreased. heat is increased. obviously with ssds a lot of these negatives are very very minor compared to hdds. but the lack of trim isn't minor, and the day-to-day unnoticeable gain in speed is another reason i wouldn't bother. even if i had 2 identical ssds i'd just leave them separate.
 
mranderson said:
No point having a RAID setup with SSD's. Even with hard disks RAID0 was not a good option especially with onboard controlers.
Click to expand...

Well from a security/failure rate then yes I agree.

However from a performance view point then no.

All my mechincal hard drives and ssd are in a raid 0 array. Nothing I can't handle if one drive fails as I have backups of important stuff.

The speed gain is worth it though IMO for home use.
 
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