RAID 0 SSD worth it? (gaming)

Durzel

Durzel

Durzel

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I've currently got 1 256GB Crucial C300 and 256GB Crucial M4 for OS, applications and games. I'd say probably 80% of the time I'm using my PC I'll be playing a game.

With Steam and Origin taking up more and more space I'm finding myself having to uninstall games I haven't played for a while to make space.

I've been thinking long and hard about getting a pair of Samsung 830 512GB SSDs and sticking them in RAID 0, but the lack of TRIM is a major turnoff. Since the "Back to School" promotion is running out at the end of September it looks like I'd have to buy them now and leave them uninstalled until such time as Intel pulls its finger out and gets TRIM working on X79.

Anyway, disregarding cost, is RAID 0 SSDs worth the aggro of RAID drivers, risk, etc over single SSD(s)?
 
Trim makes a big difference, in reviews where they purposefully write multiple times over the entire drive just to get to the bad performance state. In most systems a drive simply doesn't get to that point anyway, the drives have garbage collection, its less effective at recovering from a truly horrendous state, but seeing as drives never get that bad and garbage collection deals with the small day to day usage its really not anywhere near as big an issue as people think.

Saying that, there is very very little performance to be had from ssd's in raid.

The limit in SSD performance is 4kb single queue file access as this is purely a function of access latency, its massively better than hdd's, 0.02ms vs 13ms, but its still there and its not getting lower and multiple drives doesn't particularly help. 4kb single depth queue doesn't increase at all, and sometimes goes down marginally in raid. Sequentials will be great, but sequentials isn't what most access is. It's pretty much the same as having a Ferrari to drive to the shops in, its super fast on a motorway(well a German one without a speed limit) but its less efficient and completely useless in town. SSD's the vast majority of access is the in town stuff, not the unlimited motorway stuff.

What would be vastly cheaper and probably better for you is one 256 or 512gb drive if you fancy it, windows, and your MOST important games, things you play every day, MMO's or if you play COD online all the time that kind of thing, then buy either a hybrid drive or buy a ssd/hdd separate and use the ssd for cache, then have a 2tb drive and a cheapo ssd help boost the performance.

SSD's can help for certain games, for others its not really useful at all. I'd whack steam on an hdd, with cache if you want it, and put mmo's and anything you deem important enough on the ssd.

Basically, in your situation I'd keep the drives you have, raid 0 won't do much for you, and cost efficiency wise I'd go for a new hybrid of hdd/cache ssd setup over trying to get silly amounts of ssd storage. Raid won't do a hell of a lot for you in games.
 
As you;re already on X79 I'd buy them and install as single drives.

If you want to RAID 0 later just buy a cheap 1TB drive later on to hold your data while you build the array and you can use it for backup after you're done.
 
drunkenmaster said:
It's pretty much the same as having a Ferrari to drive to the shops in, its super fast on a motorway(well a German one without a speed limit) but its less efficient and completely useless in town. SSD's the vast majority of access is the in town stuff, not the unlimited motorway stuff.
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Great little analogy there. Never stood back and looked at it that way before.

wazza300 said:
i thought trim was supported for z77 and x79 boards?
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Z77 only at the moment, I think? Certainly X79 isn't supported yet.
 
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Z77 officially supports RAID TRIM and Z79 unofficially supports it (many reports say it works fine with the latest RST drivers).

As for whether RAID-0 is really worth it? That depends on how importantly you rate benchmarks, because my RAID-0 setup creams benches, but feels exactly the same as a single SSD for 99% of normal use. Here are my benchmark results. Without benchmarks, I honestly wouldn't be able to tell single vs RAID apart.

...but I RAID'ed anyway because I like to think that I have the best and fastest possible setup for my money.

.....plus I like tinkering.
 
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Anyone know if there is any up to date news on RAID 0 on X79? Seems like Intel and everyone else has gone quiet after saying it was "coming soon". Have got 2 Sammy 840s en route shortly and although my head is saying there would be negligible difference sticking them in RAID, my heart is saying I should for maximum speeeeeed.
 
Durzel said:
Anyone know if there is any up to date news on RAID 0 on X79? Seems like Intel and everyone else has gone quiet after saying it was "coming soon". Have got 2 Sammy 840s en route shortly and although my head is saying there would be negligible difference sticking them in RAID, my heart is saying I should for maximum speeeeeed.
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I would stick them in RAID0 if you are going to use the drives for games, your not going to have a lot of writes to the drives where trim would help.
 
i have my 2 X 128GB Crucil M4's in RAID 0.

As far as benchies go yeh you get a nice speed boost.

For things you actualy want no its actualy slower.
In games there is no speed difference at all.
boot is slower as it has to boot the raid controller first.
 
Kaapstad said:
I would stick them in RAID0 if you are going to use the drives for games, your not going to have a lot of writes to the drives where trim would help.
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Usage of my PC is about 80-90% gaming at the moment. I've got a laptop for development, etc. The plan would be to install everything on them - Windows, applications and games - and use a 2TB regular hard drive as backup for anything I couldn't afford to lose.
 
With RAID 0 you are doubling the probability of losing everything. Even assuming you lost absolutely nothing valuable (like photos and documents), a full PC rebuild is still a couple of days of wasted time. Plus as already pointed out, boot times will be greatly increased. I just can't see the point.
 
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