SSD upgrade Questions?

ximage

ximage

ximage

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Hey guys.

so i got a few questions about SSD's. just wondered if you guys would be able to help out.

So im thinking of upgrading to SSD, but am in two minds.

I do a lot of animation work and what not, using photshop, after effects, Softimage for 3D and just wondered if this upgrade would benifit me for speed?

Also if i was to buy SSD's i was thinking i would Raid two together in Raid 0 for speed (even though i dont know how to do this :S), my question about this is, if i took 2 Intel X25-M Mainstream 80GB and raided them together, would i ahve 160gb for my C drive and it will run quicker or would the C drive be 80GB and run faster? i only ask this as some one i spoke to said it would do this?

the only thing that worries me is the lack of space, without spending **** loads on a bigger drive?

What you guys reckon?

cheers for your help dudes

Sweeney
 
One of the things not many people mention is the responsiveness of a system with an ssd with your windows install on it, even when using OTHER drives in the system.

My ssd's died not long ago, been using a couple old drives I had together in raid 0, the thing that struck me most was, other than windows booting up slower and opening firefox with my old tabs saved, well it takes ages and isn't responsive when i try to open windows explorer at the same time. But when I access my 3rd/4th storage drive, it takes much longer simply to load the list of files. When I had windows on the ssd, accessing the same drive, the list would load instantly, and if I opened a vid file it would open quicker.

So capacity isn't "that" big an issue as just having windows on the ssd, improves the system as a whole and even if you install games/programs on a bigger mechanical drive, its still more responsive when you use them.

I would assume things like photo editing would be great on a ssd as the pagefile and program access will be massively faster and loading pictures in/out of the drive would offer great performance but I don't use them myself so can't be sure exactly where the bottleneck might be.

I was faced with the same option aswell, I really wanted to only spend £150-ish which puts you at, for best performance around the 50gb Vertex or the 80GB Intel, the Vertex 2 is just too damn small, the Intel has its limits and the Crucial C300 is a truly great drive but comes in 128/256gb capacity only. Its really the drive I wanted, but you have to go to £300 to get it, though compared to a Vertex 2 it offered a lot more GB per £ spent, its still a lot of money spent overall.

If you're stretching to 2 for raid you might want to look at a Crucial C300 128GB, less capacity but 2 Intels or 1 160gb intel would cost a bit more.

2x80gb Intel's in raid should give ridiculous performance though. I was very close to stretching to the 2x80gb's but really couldn't afford the extra £50 to get them.

If you do get 2x80gb's and raid them, the computer will, say when you install windows see a single 160gb drive unformatted, though you can partition this however the heck you want so you can just do a 160gb C drive.

I was raiding 2x64gb drives but have gotten pee'd off with using raid in general so opted for a single faster drive for now, when they are cheaper, like £100 for a 128gb drive I might move back to a raid 0 array again.
 
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There are different types of RAID, probably why you have got conflicting info from a friend.

RAID 0 is when you combine two HDDs, or SSDs in your case, into one big volume. Great performance but if one drive dies you lose data on both - so backups are very important.

RAID 1 is when you mirror two HDDs/SSDs. You see only one disk. Again good performance, but you only get half the capacity. However, if one disk dies you can continue using the other one without losing any data. You should still back up though! :p
 
Or 4 disks in RAID 1+0 (10) :D

An explaination...

RAID 0 = Striped - Data written to both drives as if it was one. High Performance. Capacity is both drives added together,e g 2x500Gb drives = 1Tb total capacity. Low resilience to failure.

RAID 1 = Mirrored. Data written to one drive and then mirrored to the other. Slower performance but improved resilience to failure. Capacity is that of a single drive. e.g. 2x500Gb drives = 500Gb total capacity.

RAID 1+0 (10) - Striped & Mirrored. Requires 4 drives and therefore becomes expensive but each pair in a stripe set is mirrored to the other pair of drives. You get both performance and resilience. Total capacity is 2 of the 4 drives. E.g. 4x500Gb drives = 1TB total capacity.

RAID 5 - 5 Disks! (4 Disks and a parity disk). Very High resilience. If you lose 1 disk the system will continue to function. As soon as you replace the broken disk the parity disk is able to 'rebuild' the data on the missing disk. Very expensive!

Probably less important in home computing than on servers, but it's always recommended that if you do mirror or RAID 5 is that you choose disks from the same manufacturer but different production batches. Imagine if a single batch was faulty, then all your drives in the RAID array could potentially fail with the same problem. However, you lessen the likelyhood if they are all from different manufacturing batches.

EDIT: I'm still unsure of using SSD's in my rigs as they have a short lifespan when compared with their machanical couterparts, especially for read/write intensive operations.
 
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To answer your questions:

RAID 0ing SSDs will give you some performance boost, but not as massive as doing so with conventional drives - they are not subject to the same physical limitations, so the larger SSD drives are usually faster by default.

SSDs are awesome for swap files in Photoshop etc. It'll make a HUGE difference.

Yes, if you RAID 0 2 drives, they will appear as one drive (C: or whichever you choose)

Do bear in mind that running SSDs in RAID 0 will mean you can't run TRIM on the drives, so over (a long - months to years) time you may start to see performance degradation.

I would say go with the one bigger drive, as the price is quite linear. It will be a huge boost already. You can add a second drive later and RAID it - save money, and hopefully they'll have sorted out the RAID/TRIM issues by then!
 
Delboy said:
RAID 5 - 5 Disks! (4 Disks and a parity disk). Very High resilience. If you lose 1 disk the system will continue to function. As soon as you replace the broken disk the parity disk is able to 'rebuild' the data on the missing disk. Very expensive!
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Not quite true mate, 3 disks are the minimum required for raid 5. Total usable capacity = n-1 (total number of disks (at least 3) minus 1 for parity.

EDIT: I'm still unsure of using SSD's in my rigs as they have a short lifespan when compared with their machanical couterparts, especially for read/write intensive operations.
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:confused: SSD's, unless they fail as any drive can, should last a good few years, 3 at least. With todays fast moving tech, not many people would keep a drive past 3 years anyway, they'd upgrade to bigger/better/faster.

Not trying to pull your post apart, just offering one correction and one alternative viewpoint. :)
 
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