SSD Raid 0

clade · 31 May 2011 at 14:15

Is it worth running two ssd drives in a raid 0 configuration? anyone tried this?

Im wondering if its worth buying two 60gb ssd's or not.

Zarf · 31 May 2011 at 14:43

Considering the price, no real reason not to on modern drives with good garbage collection.

SSD's are far more reliable than Mechanical drives, but have a sensible backup schedule.

joxang · 31 May 2011 at 15:07

OMGYES. The speed is incredible.

As said, garbage collection on 2nd and 3rd generation drives is very advanced so TRIM isn't an absolute necessity any more. Even back when I was running two first generation Intel X25-M 80GBs in RAID 0 there was no performance degradation after a year, so improved algorithms can only have made that better.

clade · 31 May 2011 at 15:09

Think ill get the two ssd's and run some experiments with the z68 caching and speedboost for the second ssd and then for the IDE raid 5 array.

Anyone know what tool is good for testing hdd's for speed/access etc?

ewarwoowar · 31 May 2011 at 15:10

TRIM is garbage collection. It enables the SSD to do garbage collection.
Seeing as TRIM isn't supported in RAID arrays, therefore there is no garbage collection

joxang · 31 May 2011 at 15:46

ewarwoowar said:
TRIM is garbage collection. It enables the SSD to do garbage collection.
Seeing as TRIM isn't supported in RAID arrays, therefore there is no garbage collection

Last bit isn't quite accurate. TRIM is OS 'garbage collection'.

Each drive has its own hardware level algorithms and these are what is most commonly referred to as garbage collection.

ewarwoowar · 31 May 2011 at 15:51

Touche

Either way you'll get some degradation when in RAID. I had some original x32 Corsair SSDs in RAID0 and speed degradation was incredibly fast.

Atom · 1 Jun 2011 at 04:51

GC with up to date Sandforce controllers wipes the floor with trim. You would see very little speed drop from 2 in raid0 now..

joxang · 1 Jun 2011 at 18:28

Atom said:
You would see very little speed drop from 2 in raid0 now..

I always thought the old 'speed drop w/out TRIM' was exaggerated anyway. I never noticed any with Gen 1 drives in RAID, and I've never seen any official benchmarks that prove so. As long as you're not copying 1Tbs worth of files in and out of your array every day...