SSD's - what setup to use?

[ED209]

in June I got my first SSD which was a Samsung EVO 840 250GB and I have not had any issues at all!

I had a HDD as a second drive and all my single player games went on too and my steam library but a few games on the SSD for map loading or multiplayer games and some other stuff on.

this Drive died about a month or so ago now and been limiting down what i have been installing on to the SSD due to this and limited space

over Christmas I managed to get another Samsung EVO 840 250GB which was on sale for a good price.

my question is what would you guys do? setup the two drives in raid 0 so the drive is setup as 1 drive with 500GB space or just connect it as a second drive and use it like I did my old HDD before it failed?

i have a X58 board and i am using the sata 2 connections and not sata 3 due to the marvell controller being quite poor and cant even reach the top speed of my SSD.

single drive speeds are 280mb read and write, i should be able to get the full speeds of the SSD's if I raid them and i keep nothing on my PC that i cannot replace if anything ever happens

 

[DoneADougalOnSofa]

Personally, I would keep them as separate drives.

RAIDing them will give you no real benefit, and if one drive develops a problem, you lose the lot.

As you were before would be my recommendation...

 

[JRS]

my question is what would you guys do? setup the two drives in raid 0 so the drive is setup as 1 drive with 500GB space or just connect it as a second drive and use it like I did my old HDD before it failed?

Run them seperately. RAID 0 is just going to complicate stuff for the sake of maybe possibly perhaps increasing speeds a touch.

 

[FatRakoon]

RAIDing those is just not the thing to do. There will be ZERObenefit and lots of issues.

Simply plonk Windows onto the SSD and everything else onto the HD.
I would have course put your system programs like antiVirus, defragger, and such onto the C: but the games and apps onto the HD
I RAIDed those two and setthem up as my steam folder, and I moved a few games over to them to give them a play, and guess how much faster my setup was?

ZERO. Thats right, it made absolutely no difference at all... I did not time it mind you, so it might have been a little quicker, btu certainly not one bit noticeable.

The games i tried were Dawn OF War SoulStorm, UTIII, Half Life 2 and a couple of others, and I gave them a good few levels of messing over a few weeks, but I decided that I was just wasting 2 perfectly good SSD drives for nothing.

I use SSD Drives in all my PCs and laptops for booting onto, but normal HDs for programs and Media... I simply cannot justify using SSDs for programs. Not yet anyway.

Also as a one-off, andagain for a kicker, I have tried those very same SSDs in my daughters PC for a month or so in RAID as just C: ( I felt I would gain no benefit to partitioning them as I usually would ) and again, she saw no difference from simply using her previous 60GB SSD + 320GB Sata ( My docs etc all pointing to the D: so C: wont fill up )

So, in my very humble opinion SSDs are a must for your Boot drive, but a waste of time for your data.

The only time I think it would be of a benefit, would be while you are copying stuff to/from it, btu even then, lets be honest, HDs are ver yquick these days and you rarely need that much speed that justifies the price difference?