SSD with SATA 3gbps

[OxBox]

I'm struggling to get my head around an SSD conundrum, hopefully someone can help clarify.

I can't quite find anything exactly covering this topic (just lots of bits that don't quite help me)- but apologies if I've missed something obvious.

I'd like to get an SSD to improve my boot times, game load times and possibly a bit of video editing.

I have a mobo with only 3gbps (SATA2) ports, no 6gbps ports. PCIe SATA3 add in cards seem fairly unappealing (extra thing to buy, possibly some compatibility issues, may not perform as well as expected).

For the sake of argument, let's say I want about 240GB of storage, and use the Vertex 2s and 3s as examples. 240GB seems to be the capacity where the write speeds are best (e.g. within a model range, 120GB models typically seem to have about half the read speed).

So, the choices seem to be:

1. Single 240GB SATA2 drive
2. Two 120GB SATA2 drives- striped RAID for performance.
3. Single 240GB sata3, but bottlenecked on my current system.

I'm not clear what "real world" results would be on my system though. In case it helps, it is an i7 920 on a Gigabyte x58 EX54-UD4 with 9GB RAM, GTX280.

I'm not sure if striped RAID will simply hit some other bottleneck, or whether 2xVertex2s' read performance could get close to 1xVertex3's (on 6gbps). Theoretically 2xSATA2 channels give the same bandwidth as 1x SATA3. Also, if write performance is roughly halved on the 120GB model, then RAIDed it might be roughly equal. Kind of like getting SATA3 on the cheap by using 2xSATA2 ports. So, option 2 looks appealing, but maybe this is unrealistic.

However, option 3 would be best if/when in the future I upgrade my system and have SATA3 ports available. Also, it doesn't rely on RAID (OK, SSDs fail in read only mode, but striping is still doubling your chances of having a time consuming failure, even if that doesn't mean losing data). Also, the drives don't run at peak rates all of the time- random reads (which I believe approximate boot up scenarios) seem to be around about within the scope of (non-RAIDed) SATA2, so maybe my boot time would be unaffected by SATA2.

I'm aware that option 3 will cost more than 1 or 2.

Thanks in advance for any guidance

 

[linktoinsanity]

Don't bother RAIDing SSDs, any performance increase will just get bottlenecked by the controller anyway.

Using a sata3 drive on a sata 2 controller won't affect performance too badly. So either go with your option 1 or option 3.

 

[cmndr_andi]

I would go with a single SATA3 drive. If you look at this review - the 240GB Vertex 3 drive is a good deal faster than the 120GB version (in that review the vertex 3 drives using the SATA 3Gbps ports are represented by orange bars) and you don't have any issues with RAID and lack of TRIM.

 

[Darkman]

RAID 0 will be faster on SATA 3GBps and the extra headroom (unallocated space on both drives) will help Vertex 2Es (or Agility 3s if you buy today while they are still at pre-order price) to do the garbage collection during idle time (as TRIM only works on single drives atm).

Obviously it's slightly more set up time and you need to back up your data just in case a drive fails but if you want the fastest option as per your OP this is it.

A single Vertex 3 or Agility 3 on SATA 3Gbps will be indistinguishable from the previous generation Vertex 2E due to the limitation of the bandwidth (circa 250-275Mbps actual).