Two smaller SSDs cheaper/better option?

[mckrackin5324]

I have 1350GB of HDD left in my gaming PC and want to replace it with SSD.

Ok then...this is where I get confused...

 

Two 525GB SSDs is cheaper vs one 1TB SSD. Of the same brand and speeds.

I'm replacing two HDDs so that's not an issue. 

So why pay more for one drive with less capacity?

As a matter of fact,I'm more comfortable splitting my stuff up among drives just so a failure doesn't cost me everything.

 

And can I do an outright clone of my HDDs even though one of them has more than 525GB on it?

Or am I going to have to remap some stuff?

[glitchmaster0001]

what you can do is just take 2 of those 512GB SSDs and run them in Raid 1 or even Raid 0 if you are brave enough. You would get a larger speed increase in read and write if you go Raid 0 but you do run risks in which if 1 drive fails then you lose all of your data. As of Raid 1 you would have more reliable redundant backup of data in which if one of the drives die, the other one can rebuild all the data again once you replace the drive. 

[Zygizz]

For me its better too buy one ssd with bigger space because its useful on storage side of things files dont need be on differents disk.

 

Of couse you can stripe 2 smaler ssd in raid 0 and gain same capacity(more speed ) as bigger one but only one ssd fails you lose all your data.

[mckrackin5324]

2 minutes ago, glitchmaster0001 said:

what you can do is just take 2 of those 512GB SSDs and run them in Raid 1 or even Raid 0 if you are brave enough. You would get a larger speed increase in read and write if you go Raid 0 but you do run risks in which if 1 drive fails then you lose all of your data. 

Raid 1 would be for me then. Speed is not that big a deal. It's a gaming rig....

[mckrackin5324]

1 minute ago, Zygizz said:

For me its better too buy one ssd with bigger space because its useful on storage side of things files dont need be on differents disk.

 

Of couse you can stripe 2 smaler ssd in raid 0 and gain same capacity(more speed ) as bigger one but only one ssd fails you lose all your data.

What happens to your data when the single larger SSD fails?

[glitchmaster0001]

1 minute ago, mckrackin5324 said:

Raid 1 would be for me then. Speed is not that big a deal. It's a gaming rig....

but just know that if you run RAID 1 then you will effectively lose 512GB of storage space since data is written equally on both drives. Yes you would technically have 1TB of flash storage installed however, only 512GB of it can be used and accessed. the other 512GB is just a redundant backup in case of drive failure then it would be used to rebuild data once you get a new drive to replace it. 

[glitchmaster0001]

3 minutes ago, mckrackin5324 said:

What happens to your data when the single larger SSD fails?

you still lose all of your data unless you made a backup of the larger drive on some other storage medium like a external HDD or something of that nature. RAID 1 your drive would make you sacrifice storage space for redundancy and RAID 0 sacrifices redundancy and storage space for raw speed  

[mckrackin5324]

1 minute ago, glitchmaster0001 said:

but just know that if you run RAID 1 then you will effectively lose 512GB of storage space since data is written equally on both drives. Yes you would technically have 1TB of flash storage installed however, only 512GB of it can be used and accessed. the other 512GB is just a redundant backup in case of drive failure then it would be used to rebuild data once you get a new drive to replace it. 

I see. Thanks.

Right now,I have four drives. No raid or anything.

Everything is pathed to individual drives.

Problem is,there are 900GB of games on one drive so my paths would get broken with two individual SSDs. Not a big deal to relabel some stuff though. Maybe even just do new installs of all the games. All the saves are on one small SSD anyway.

[mckrackin5324]

Oh...could I extend my partition from one SSD to another and keep the paths intact?

[mckrackin5324]

What's really strange to me is that when you jump to 2TB of storage,four 525GB SSDs is WAY cheaper. Like 20-25% cheaper.

I'm basing my pricing off Crucial by the way.

 

Overlap is the only issue to me. Like,getting 500GB on a drive and you buy a new game that is 30GB,you have 25GB on one drive that will not get used.

That's why I'm asking about extended partitions.

[mckrackin5324]

Speed is not my issue for the record.

My only concerns are power draw and heat....and noise.

I'd like all those HDDs gone from my system.

[Jovidah]

-For SSDs bigger usually means even more speed (although this is mostly true for the lower capacities, there isn't much of a difference between 500 & 1000 GB)

-Splitting it up for 'higher reliability' is ridiculous as it also doubles the chance of a drive failure

-SSDs have a tendency to lose performance as you fill them up to maximum capacity. Having two smaller drives will likely cause you to struggle with this far more than with 1 large disk

-Putting SSDs in RAID really doesn't offer any tangible performance improvement unless you're doing some kind of high-end video work that requires the higher sequential speeds.

-Putting 2 SSDs in RAID 1 for storing games just seems like a total waste of money to me when you're mostly storing games. If there's any really critical data on there just make sure it's either backed up or on cloud storage. Given the ridiculously low RMA rates on some of the popular SSD models (something around 0,25% for the Samsung 850 EVO) I really wouldn't do this unless you have some kind of mission critical setup or use it in a professional environment where any downtime costs you money.

 

Long story short... just go for the bigger disk.

[Jovidah]

Oh and if you really just 'want to get rid of all the HDD', I'd advice you to wait a little longer. Prices are expected to drop more over the coming year.

[mckrackin5324]

14 minutes ago, Jovidah said:

 

-Splitting it up for 'higher reliability' is ridiculous as it also doubles the chance of a drive failure

 

 

Long story short... just go for the bigger disk.

Not so ridiculous to me.

I've lost two SSDs. I know they have a limited life. Very limited as a matter of fact.

I'm convinced that all my SSDs will fail eventually so it's a matter of how much do I want to re-download at a time.

Sure,Corsair replaced the SSD both times but it's a huge pain. The first time was my c: drive with Windows and that sucked.

My Windows SSD is now a 120GB and I have a clone of it on a 2.5" HDD that I update once a month or so.

I don't keep copies of games. Sometimes a clean install is a good thing anyway.

 

You have made me consider 2TB options though.

My game library will fill a 1TB drive the same as two 525GB drives.

[Jovidah]

You've either been extremely unlucky or picking unreliable brands/drives. There are some unreliable crap drives around (the OCZ used to be notorious) but with the quality drives this simply isn't true. Looking at the statistics from hardware.fr, the RMA rates on Samsung SSDs are somewhere around 0,25% to at most a 0,5%. Crucial's RMA rates don't really stray much higher either.

 

And as I said... splitting it makes no sense. The advantage of 'only losing half the data' is pretty much negated by the doubled chance of a drive failure. Unless you go RAID of course, but that's a rather wasteful affair.

[mckrackin5324]

1 minute ago, Jovidah said:

You've either been extremely unlucky or picking unreliable brands/drives. There are some unreliable crap drives around (the OCZ used to be notorious) but with the quality drives this simply isn't true. Looking at the statistics from hardware.fr, the RMA rates on Samsung SSDs are somewhere around 0,25% to at most a 0,5%. Crucial's RMA rates don't really stray much higher either.

 

And as I said... splitting it makes no sense. The advantage of 'only losing half the data' is pretty much negated by the doubled chance of a drive failure. Unless you go RAID of course, but that's a rather wasteful affair.

Thanks!

Both bad drives were Corsair. Neither lived past warranty so yeah...unlucky.

But it taught me a lesson.

The splitting isn't a reliability thing as much as cost.

I mentioned reliability as a passing thought.

 

The more 525GB drives you use,the cheaper it gets.

Two of them are $10 cheaper than a 1TB but four of them is $100 cheaper than a 2TB.

[glitchmaster0001]

51 minutes ago, mckrackin5324 said:

Speed is not my issue for the record.

My only concerns are power draw and heat....and noise.

I'd like all those HDDs gone from my system.

well with SSDs no matter what they are always going to be more energy efficient than a traditional mechanical hard drive 

[knightslugger]

if you're worried about drive failure, use RAID5 and back up your system every day. put those old spinners to use in a NAS.

[xentropa]

5 hours ago, mckrackin5324 said:

I have 1350GB of HDD left in my gaming PC and want to replace it with SSD.

Ok then...this is where I get confused...

 

Two 525GB SSDs is cheaper vs one 1TB SSD. Of the same brand and speeds.

I'm replacing two HDDs so that's not an issue. 

So why pay more for one drive with less capacity?

 

It probably has to do with the manufacturing process and a term known as binning.

 

SSD makers only manufacture 1 TB 3DVNAND chips (or whatever the highest capacity is).  Due to manufacturing defects, portions of the 3dvnand chips will be unusuable.  Rather than discarding the chip entirely, they just disable the bad parts and sell it as a lower capacity device.  Usually, on a single wafer process, a small portion would be fully functioning while the majority of the wafer has defects that prevent the entire chip from being used.

[Bradl79]

with SSD not having mechanical parts it may have a lesser fail rate, so if u raid0 2 SSD's u will get faster speeds, that is what i had done, also to since SSD's lives are more of read and writes, having 2 in raid0 should have a longer life span i would think, also just make backups if ur stuff is important, i have 2 240GB SSD's Raid0 and a 2TB as my image backups i use Acronis True Image, so i don't have to worry about loosing anything if one drive fails and by the time it does it will be cheap enough to buy a new one and reimage and ur back

[mckrackin5324]

17 hours ago, xentropa said:

It probably has to do with the manufacturing process and a term known as binning.

 

SSD makers only manufacture 1 TB 3DVNAND chips (or whatever the highest capacity is).  Due to manufacturing defects, portions of the 3dvnand chips will be unusuable.  Rather than discarding the chip entirely, they just disable the bad parts and sell it as a lower capacity device.  Usually, on a single wafer process, a small portion would be fully functioning while the majority of the wafer has defects that prevent the entire chip from being used.

By that logic,there is more cost in producing the smaller capacity SSDs. Hmmm

[Jovidah]

It doesn't make sense because he/she is talking crap. SSD's do not consist of a single NAND chip, they consist of multiple chips. The binning proces / differentiation isn't as easy as with CPU's / GPU's (which are single chip designs). Often higher capacity drives will simply have more chips, however the density might also change.

 

There is however a possible advantage in scale due to certain 'overhead costs' not being duplicated (controler, DRAM buffer, packaging, etc.). It pretty much depends on the manufacturer, their process and the choices they made whether the larger ones are actually cheaper or more expensive.

 

Then there's also market economics. There's a fair amount of competition in the lower capacity drives, but as almost no one makes 2 and 4 TB drives they can ask a hefty premium for those.

 

Not that any of this really changes what has been said before about utlity, ease of use, etc. The differences are minor - except in the really high capacity drives. But IMO it's better to wait a year for prices to drop further before throwing in the cash to replace your HDDs with SDDs.

[mckrackin5324]

Here's a flaw in the "double the chance of failure" argument...

1TB SSD fails and all data is lost.

One of a pair of 500GB SSDs in Raid fails and all data is lost. BUT you have a 500GB SSD that can be re-used. So the cost of repair is less than 50% of the 1TB failure.

 

1TB failure=total loss of data and equipment.

1 of 2 500GB failure=total loss of data and 50% loss of equipment.

[Jovidah]

Your logic is unassailable! I guess you should just get 8 120 GB drives instead and put them in RAID 0! Sure, if one of them drives you lose all your data, but you still retain 90% of your equipment!

 

 

 

 

 

Honestly... are you pulling my leg? You completely missed the part where having 2 drives instead of 1 doubles your chance of a failure and the fact that it could be replaced under warranty. Really, if you're not going to listen to advice, don't ask for it.

[mckrackin5324]

4 hours ago, Jovidah said:

Your logic is unassailable! I guess you should just get 8 120 GB drives instead and put them in RAID 0! Sure, if one of them drives you lose all your data, but you still retain 90% of your equipment!

 

 

 

 

 

Honestly... are you pulling my leg? You completely missed the part where having 2 drives instead of 1 doubles your chance of a failure and the fact that it could be replaced under warranty. Really, if you're not going to listen to advice, don't ask for it.

Just an opinion and I'm listening. Definitely not making fun of people for their opinion.

And last I checked,warranties end. Rather soon. But you did make a point to say how very unlikely a failure is during the warranty period.

 

I even said that I'm now considering a 2TB SSD because of advice in this thread.