Can I use two SSDs and one HDD in RAID?

[Sonikiliky01]

I' fairly new to the whole gaming rig building and I'm still planning my first, but I can't find an answer. Can I use 2 SSDs and put them both as a whole in RAID 1 with an HDD? This way, if one SSD fails, I can format them both and copy the files back in RAID. Of course I would also have a separate HDD for main storage, and this setup for OS and few games. Is it possible at all? If not, what's the closest thing I can do to have that fail- proof security for my drives?

[TheKDub]

No.

 

You can raid the SSDs, and have the HDD separate, but you cannot raid the three together.

[Peter Vaughan Truslow]

RAID 0 the SSDs with nightly backups to the HDD.

or RAID 1 the SSDs and you already have your redundancy right there.

[CowsGoRoar]

I think OP meant to have RAID 10 with the SSD's in RAID 0 and have it RAID 1 to the HDD.

 

No,but you can RAID 0 the SSD's and set the hard drive as backup, you can call it "virtual RAID 10" :3

[fRodzet]

im pretty sure raid uses the speed of the slowest drive and then multiplys them by the number of drives it doesnt just add all of the speeds up  

 

No, that is not how it works

 

If you have for example some memory that needs to be addressed, the drives are splitting up the addressing. So if you have a bit address like the example below:

 

11000101110

 

A single drive would have to address all the values in the bit array. If you then run something in RAID0 each drive attached to that raid, will read it's own bit value, so the workload is split between the drives.

 

So let's just say you have two drives in RAID0, the first drive reads the first bit in the array and the second drive reads the second bit in the array, then once the first is finished with it's first bit, it jumps to the third bit, that is the 0 in this case, and once the second drive completes it's task, it jumps to the fourth bit in the array, that is the next 0 in my example. This keeps going on, until all the data is addressed. More drives would then mean that less things needs to be addressed per drive.

[fRodzet]

its still going to be limited by the speed of the lowest drive though right? for example: a 100mbs drive and a 40mbs drive in raid 0 will give you 80mbs combined.

 

You can sort of estimate it like that yes. The overall performance would be better than a regular HDD, but worse than a regular SSD. Raiding Harddrives and SSD's is not bad though, it can be useful for certain situations.. 

 

However putting two SSD's with similar specs in RAID0, should in theory double the performance, as they both would only have to address half the workload each.

 

 

You can think about it like this:

 

Take two guys, one being fast at solving math (the SSD) and the other being slow (the HDD)

 

They are assigned 10 tasks to solve, the result of each task is needed in order for a new task to begin.

They decide to team up and solve a task each, then share the results with each other.

Once the first guy is done (SSD) he is now awaiting results from the second guy (HDD), who is still struggling with his task. (He will have to wait, because he cannot move on to the next task until he has the results needed to complete that task)

Now the second guy is done with his task, they interchange their results, the first guy moves on to task 3 and the second guy to task 4.

Each time the first guy is done with his tasks he will have to wait for the second guy to also finish.

 

Now the thing is, for the first guy, everything went slower, but for the second guy, everything was sped up.

 

Take the same scenario again, this time with two guys with the same calculation speed.

 

They are both complete with their tasks at the same time, they can interchange results right away and thus have reduced their overall time spent on solving the 10 tasks.

[michaelcouch04]

Good experience with raid here. It is possible to have hhd array with ssd cache