Second SSD drive required - options?

Jed Shields · 29 May 2014 at 13:55

Hi guys,

I've been going through the pain of constantly deleting and moving games from my Crucial M4 256Gb SSD drive for far too long, and SSDs prices have now dropped enough for me to consider buying another. What's the best option for this? Should I go for a Crucial M500 240Gb or a Samsung EVO 250GB and use as the primary, keeping the M4 as a secondary for games that I don't use as frequently, or would I see a benefit in a RAID 0 setup?

Any suggestions?

Cheers,

Jed

slipperydave · 29 May 2014 at 13:56

you can't beat the Samsung drives

wazza300 · 29 May 2014 at 13:58

Samsung for os,crucial m4 for storage

I wouldn't risk 500gb of data in a raid0 array tbh,the results wouldn't be much faster

Jed Shields · 29 May 2014 at 14:03

All my data is on my mechanical drives and backed up on my server, the M4 just has the OS, games and programs so it's not a problem if I lose the data on a RAID 0 setup. Apart from the pain of reinstalling

wazza300 · 29 May 2014 at 14:04

its upto you,try and see

GefGz · 29 May 2014 at 14:55

You really wouldn't benefit from RAID0 if you're already running the drives in SATA3, it's not worth losing the space just for artificial speed increases that only benchmarks will benefit from, real world testing RAID0 for SSDs is pretty bloody pointless.

Source: my wallet

edit: didn't even answer the other question doh, get the samsung. Crucial drives are great but my Evo is rock solid.

Jed Shields · 29 May 2014 at 15:01

GefGz said:
You really wouldn't benefit from RAID0 if you're already running the drives in SATA3, it's not worth losing the space just for artificial speed increases that only benchmarks will benefit from, real world testing RAID0 for SSDs is pretty bloody pointless.

Source: my wallet

edit: didn't even answer the other question doh, get the samsung. Crucial drives are great but my Evo is rock solid.

I didn't think you lose space with RAID 0?

mightymouse · 30 May 2014 at 20:58

just use the M4 for all the games and samsung for OS. I have a 128 samsung evo for OS and 250 evo to store all the games

Quartz · 30 May 2014 at 21:03

I recently purchased a second Samsung 500 GB SSD. I moved a lot of data, but to minimise disruption, I used the MKLINK command to redirect from C: to D: So, for example, c:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steamapps is now a junction to d:\Data\Steamapps and Steam sees no difference.

GefGz · 30 May 2014 at 22:09

Jed Shields said:
I didn't think you lose space with RAID 0?

You don't, I just suck at writing properly apparently.

No storage loss with RAID0 since it stripes the data across both drives, I just wanted to say that the speed increase isn't noticeable or even really useable in the real world, just benchmarks.

413x · 30 May 2014 at 22:59

im going for a third M4 currently.
raid 0 for me

i have been running raid 0 for years (WD velociraptors and now SSDs)
the fear of failure is overblown IMO
I wouldnt recommend it without back up really but when it only takes under an hour for a recovery may as well

im on SATA 2 however

Quartz · 31 May 2014 at 00:08

Quartz said:
I recently purchased a second Samsung 500 GB SSD. I moved a lot of data, but to minimise disruption, I used the MKLINK command to redirect from C: to D: So, for example, c:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steamapps is now a junction to d:\Data\Steamapps and Steam sees no difference.

Perhaps more elegantly, you can use a volume mount point.