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which would you choose...

  • Thread starter Thread starter rjk
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rjk

rjk

rjk

OcUK Staff
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and reasons why

i have both these options available to me

and not sure which one to stick with as my main drive

the 80GB drives have a bit of performance degredation as they have been going two months now and are 80% full

the 160gb drive is brand new with latest firmware and 0GB used

decisions.jpg
 
For an OS drive I'd probably go for the first one, since you're mainly going to be reading from that drive rather than writing so the much faster read speed should make the OS feel faster.
 
I'm trying to decide the same thing [with 2x40GB or 1x80GB], so would be interested what others think...

The RAID array is holding it's own in read, but falling behind in write. Is this actually affecting you? (hence making the change worthwhile...)

What I've been mulling over is that there is presumably a threshold where the extra performance becomes meaningless. If we say a strength of the Intel drives is the IOPS, one option would be to use the two 80GB drives but not in a RAID array - one for OS, the other for page file & applications for example. I have no idea whether that would be sensible or not, but perhaps worth considering? Not having a RAID array to initialise would reduce boot times too, whether that would counter the lower reads or not I don't know...
 
i have one currently
there is another on the way as a competition prize

not sure if is should RAID them
 
Bragging rights would go through the roof. Whilst you're still running from the 80GB drives, why don't you clone onto the 160GB drive(s) and have a play?
 
Myself I would be going for the 160GB with TRIM, over time SSDs can get quite bad if they have nothing to keep them in check.
 
what could i expect from 4X80GB intels in RAID0?

anyone seen any benchmarks?


also, what is the point at which readspeeds become 'too fast' to notice?
 
I would go for the single 160gb ssd tbh rjk. I'm sure you would rather maintain the ssd with TRIM enabled? I can't see a reason you would have to raid, they are fast enough for os and games.

Stick with the single 160gb ssd mate, it has trim which I think is very important and also, its fast enough :D Thats my honest opinion.
 
rjkoneill said:
what could i expect from 4X80GB intels in RAID0?

anyone seen any benchmarks?


also, what is the point at which readspeeds become 'too fast' to notice?
Click to expand...

Your sequential reads will be capped fairly soon, think the ICH controllers cap out around 660MB/s, so you'd get no benefit there from the fourth stripe, though small file IOPS and writes would still see a boost.

That said, i'm of the opinion that once your drive is capable of doing over 15Mb/s on 4K operations, in normal consumer conditions by that point you're spending so little actual time on 4K ops that you can't percieve the extra speed ... Kinda like going from 100FPS to 200FPS.

If your computer spends a lot of time on sequential file work, like videos or copying data around, then there is still a case for improving speeds here as the PC is spending enough time on these tasks that you can perceive improvements.
 
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