RAID0 vs SSD

chuck990 · 29 Oct 2010 at 13:37

So, the thread in the latest news section about the 320Gb F4, Superted854 says that two of these in RAID0 out-do his Vertex 2....

So can two mechanical drives beat one SSD? I just bought a 1Tb F3, would a second one give me SSD type performance? I think my mobo can do a hardware RAID (which i believe is faster?) if this makes any difference

jorzeh · 29 Oct 2010 at 13:39

No access speed alone means the SSD would just whoop it.

cmndr_andi · 29 Oct 2010 at 13:48

It really depends on the type of work you are doing with the drives.

If it is mainly sequential reads/writes (ie. transferring big files) then a RAID0 of fast mechanical drives can certainly match or beat a single modern generation SSD.

However, this is not the type of transfers that most people do. Usually it is lots of small files - that need to be accessed quickly, in this case SSDs will absolutely trounce a mechanical RAID0 array. This is because the solid state nature of the drives means that the response times are hundreds of times faster and the random read/write speeds are many times faster.

Superted854 · 29 Oct 2010 at 13:54

When I get time I will post the Atto benches from both my Vertex 2 and F4's for comparrison

chuck990 · 29 Oct 2010 at 13:55

cheers superted

Superted854 · 29 Oct 2010 at 18:22

As promised benches are below with the Vertex 2 on the left and the F4's on he right: -

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chuck990 · 29 Oct 2010 at 18:45

wow.. even on the smaller files the f4 is better,,,

Superted854 · 29 Oct 2010 at 19:40

Yeah I was really surprised by results

Zarf · 29 Oct 2010 at 20:06

Means very little in the scheme of things though. SSD's are much faster in real use because the access times are hundreds of times smaller. HDD's suck at multitasking, If you for instance had two operations instead of one going on an SSD would perform both operations at half max sequential speed, but on an hdd (even RAID0) you'd be lucky to see a tenth the maximum sequential speed.

Superted854 · 30 Oct 2010 at 08:15

Actually using the F4's a little bit now for normal eveyday tasks and i'm not sure they even feel as fast a my 300gb Velociraptor that i planned on replacing.

Unzipping large files just seems to take longer even though on Atto the Velociraptor only score 120mb read/writes.

jewii · 3 Nov 2010 at 14:47

i would go for raid, one for the capacity of the drives and because SDD's are still quite fragile with writing data in the long term

.:SAmSuNG:. · 3 Nov 2010 at 19:18

Long term is like years aint it? I cant say i normally keep parts for more than 2 years.