SSD Drives advice needed.

[mythrandyr]

Hi guys,

well, a bit back i had to return one of my two sammys and to cut a long story short it was not replaced meaning that i had to shell out for a replacement.

So i have one remaining samsung 64GB SSD, 3 Patriot Extreme Warp 32GB drives and 1 samsung 320GB F1 for storage.

The question is this. Do i tear out the samsung and replace it with a 4th patriot warp or continue to use it to store/install apps from and call it quits, maybe using it as a boot drive in the eventuality of my raid failing?

What's bothering me with this move is raid. If i buy a 4th warp drive then i can obtain maximum performance from all of the drives in raid and i will also have more raid options made available to me such as Raid 10 but then i will have very limited storage and i just can't make up my mind what to do.

I intend to upgrade the F1 320 to a 1TB drive or possibly a 2TB green drive but since this is being used for data storage, performance isn't important, it's just the question of what to do with the SSD's that's doing my nutt in.

 

[Zarf]

What's your RAID contoller? If you've got a decent hardware RAID controller, go with 4x patriot drives in RAID0. If you're just running off an old motherboard try selling off the patriots and get a second samsung 64gb and raid0 them.

Once you get a 1TB mechanical drive just take regular backups/snapshots. SSD's cost too much to waste them on RAID10 redundancy for your OS and App Installs.

 

[mythrandyr]

well, the only raid controller i can use at the minute is the one built into the Asus P5Q3 Wifi Deluxe board, which will be upgraded soon anyway.

But i've just, this weekend actually, placed an order for the 3rd Patriot which means that it should be here by tommorrow.

Those samsungs are great drives but the problem is with them is that they are not abundant enough since their is only one online retailer that currently sells them. If one of those drives break, which one of mine did, and they are out of stock then you're knackered not only that but the price of them is going through the roof now, almost £150 per drive the last time i looked.

And two of those drives were not, suprisingly, all that quick in raid when i last had it up and running, unless it was something that i was doing wrong, which is possible but only just. One of the things that i do like about the patriot warp drives is that according to Atto and HDTune, they do achieve very close to what they say they will sustained performance wise and it was either 3 of those or 3 crucial drives.... enough said.

I think it would be better to keep going after the patriot warp in raid 0, i only need 1 more now to finish the job and then i can try to recover some of that money by letting go of the samsung on auction or elsewhere now, i only need £85 for it to make it worth while.