Raid or Not

[Gabriel_Hansson]

Need some SSD solution help!

 

So I am looking around for my new Gaming/Fast Application Build and i was not sure if I wanted to go fore a 256  GB Samsung Pro, and then i see other people getting multiple drives. I am not so familiar with SSD because my last build was for a really long time ago. So questions are if it is quicker to go for a 128 x 2 in Raid 0 or just a 256 GB and are the Samsung Pros reliable enough for that? Like will boot up time with Win 8.1 be quicker and things like that. (Mostly what i was about to store there).

 

Thanks in advance! 

 

 

[sqwidee]

You can buy the 256GB for a little less than two 128GB SSDs in most cases, plus the RAID array sets you up for potential failure of two drives.

Samsung EVO is a great price for a reliable line of drives.

 

I would just get the bigger one, since SSDs don't really have any noticeable performance boost in RAID when it comes to gaming.

 

From my experience so far, 256GB is too small for boot drive + games (I have a 128GB drive for this). I've nearly maxed out my 1TB HDD with games already. Only the games with long load blocks get SSD installs on my setup...

 

And since you're new to SSDs I'll warn you: DON'T DEFRAG THEM. They don't need it, all that does is reduce their lifetime!

[theKumba]

Yes, you will get quicker system starts if you get 2x 128gb ssds in raid 0 and the samsung storage controllers are one of the most reliable ones. I personall dont like the idea of raid 0 yet. The only thing I want to raid are my storage drives in raid 1.

[SkilledRebuilds]

Raid controllers also add boot time... which mitigates the faster booting time.

 

So its about the same.

Day to day stuff isn't faster either, by the time the drive even tries, the task is done usually.

[asquirrel]

I have a physical RAID card (onboard raid presented issues back when I didn't realize my overclock was the reason my system was unstable). A physical RAID card will run you about $500. $250-ish for the card, and another $250 for the battery backup unit. "Pfft, I don't need a battery backup!" ok, true, but it will disable the write-cache on the card, making your drives *much* slower than they should/could be.

 

That said, for performance, a physical RAID card will turn 2 slow 7200 RPM 1TB SATA drives into something as fast as a circa 2011/2012 SSD. Modern SSDs will blow it out of the water.

 

RAID for an SSD is...overkill. Use RAID if you *need* many physical hard drives but don't want to wait forever to access the data on them. Use RAID for storage that is less than 10¢ per GB. For fast storage like an SSD, don't use RAID, just get backup software (Acronis True Image seems popular) and create nightly backups to your massive (and reasonably fast) spinning disk storage. If your SSD dies, it will be a lot less of a headache to restore from backup than deal with RAID. Trust me. I've rebuilt many RAID arrays, and I look forward to scrapping my system and going to the simpler solution of backup and restore.

[Gabriel_Hansson]

Thanks for all the replies, pretty sure what I'll do with my SSDs, thanks!