raid 10 vs sata SSD

Rahimi0151 · May 12, 2020

Hey guys. i was wondering, which one to use as a scratch disk for video editing? or for a faster steam library.

1. five 320GB hard drives in raid 0 for performance, and a 2TB in their raid 1 for redundancy.

2. a 2TB SATA SSD.

here's why i'm asking this question: i was doing some napkin math and i figured out, i can buy a 2TB HDD for 50$ and 5 320GB HDDs for around 20$ each (150$ total) . but if i wanted to buy a 2TB SSD form a "reputable" brand, it wold cost me anything from 200 to 450 bucks.

I know that having 6 drives will increase the chance of a hardware failure, but on the other hand, i could buy 2 more 320GB and still come out ahead!

BTW, i already have a 120 NVME as a boot drive, so that's not a concern for me. and also, my PSU can drive 6 HDDs at the same time. and i have 6 SATA-III 6GB/s ports on my motherboard.

and let's change gears a little bit. as Linus demonstrated in this video, NVME doesn't give any real world improvements in day to day use. so, is it better to use 4 of the fattydove ssd's (featured in this video) in raid 0 and a 500GB HDD in raid 1, as opposed to using a 970 pro? the cost difference will be (4*20 + 30 = 110$) vs 170$

I would really like for each of the members to say what they think about this approach.

Electronics Wizardy · May 12, 2020

why so many tiny hdds, just ge fewer bigger ones. I don't think they even make those anymore, so likely old stock.

But the ssd will smoke any hdd array in terms of performance. Id just get a single ssd

Grabhanem · May 12, 2020

I'm not a storage or video editing expert, but from what I understand the reason an NVMe drive doesn't see much advantage over a SATA SSD is latency for random operations, and on a RAID array latency will be worse.