mixing drive types

Guest2 · 19 Mar 2014 at 13:53

I have a Crucial M4 128gb SSD.

I have seen the M500 is quite a bit less (£53 for 120gb and £82 for 240gb)

Would it be ok to mix drive types for backing up / RAID? I would probably sell my 150gb velociraptor and get a 120gb m500 for £53

ndaar · 19 Mar 2014 at 16:11

While you can use different drives to raid it is normally better to do the same drive type to minimize the chances of errors.

Does depend on the type of raid as well obviously.

If you are just backing up data to a second drive it isn't as much of a problem.

Guest2 · 19 Mar 2014 at 19:41

Thanks, I thought so. I thought about RAID 1 for OS but that's a bit overkill really.

Will just get a £50 M500 120gb and every ~2 weeks create a windows backup image

edit - is the M4 or M500 faster? I have seen reviews saying the M500 is faster then forums with people saying the original M4 is. I am using a P55-UD5 motherboard, i take it the M500 is supported but only at SATAII speeds instead of SATAIII (like now with my m4)

bledd · 19 Mar 2014 at 20:23

Unless you will actually benefit from stupendous drive speed, maybe video editing or something, I wouldn't bother raiding ssds.

Just take weekly images instead of raid 1

Guest2 · 19 Mar 2014 at 20:38

I was going to do raid 1 instead of 0 - not too bothered about a bit of speed loss but would like redundancy.

Having said that, if i have a 2 week backup of os drive then all is good

samsung 840 evo 120gb is only £62, is this worth the extra tenner over the m500 (then use this as primary os drive with my m4 as backup)

bledd · 20 Mar 2014 at 01:42

Personally, I use SSD as my Windows drive and another one as my Steam drive

I have a mechanical drive that I keep Documents/Downloads on.

The mechanical drive is backed up constantly, I take images of my SSD's once a week ish..

ndaar · 20 Mar 2014 at 09:18

The Samsung Evo does offer slightly better performance over the crucial M500, for the sake of a few extra quid id opt for the Samsung.