Multiple SSD's, without RAID

Merackon · April 12, 2014

Hi,

Before I commit to this, I was just wondering if any of you thought it was foolish, stupid, if a better option was available, or if I should just RAID the drives. I currently have an 840 Pro at 256GB, however, I would like to move up to a full SSD system in my computer with high reliability, so I was entertaining the idea of buying 3-4 840's or 730 or whatever SSD's of varying sizes to meet the requirements. Initially, I drew up a table of items that would have to be stored, and then whether they would be stored in different locations or whether they would be on the same drive in the end of the system.

OS
Programs
Games
Music + Video

Photos would be stored on a HDD.

I have tried this sort of solution before on a MacBook Pro by having 2 SSD's under the metal, one for the OS and the other for the rest, which seemed to make a massive jump in performance when compared with the issues of using a single one on its own in an attempt to minimize cost. So I was curious as to whether this would have an effect on performance, as the drives individually wouldn't be as close to maximum capacity as the single one is at the moment.

As a side note, the motherboard I am using is an ASUS X79 Deluxe, therefore only having 2 SATA III ports on the Intel Controller, 4 on the Marvell Controller and 2 on the ASmedia Controller, would having the other drives or any drive for that matter plugged into these ports have a major impact on the performance of the input and output speeds of that drive?

Thanks in advance,

Jack

elkenrod · April 13, 2014

I think you already have a pretty awesome machine between the MB and CPU.

I don't think it makes sense to get smaller SSDs unless money is a factor. If you are contemplating the purchase of 3-4 256GB drives, I would recommend just getting two 500GB or a 1TB drive.

Also, organizing your files based on the physical drives themselves seldom works, due to the variance in size of the file types/programs (e.g. games may take up more space than your apps).

I don't think you will notice the difference between the SATA III controllers if you are using SSDs.

Merackon · April 18, 2014

I think you already have a pretty awesome machine between the MB and CPU.

I don't think it makes sense to get smaller SSDs unless money is a factor. If you are contemplating the purchase of 3-4 256GB drives, I would recommend just getting two 500GB or a 1TB drive.

Also, organizing your files based on the physical drives themselves seldom works, due to the variance in size of the file types/programs (e.g. games may take up more space than your apps).

I don't think you will notice the difference between the SATA III controllers if you are using SSDs.

Yeah thanks, it is an area that I am not overly sure about and just wanted to sort out before I went and committed to anything stupid, which I won't any longer