SSD Upgrade

beerisyum · June 1, 2015

I currently have an Asus Z87 Sabertooth with a 250GB 840 Evo as the main drive and a 2TB HDD with the Videos, Photos, and Music folders pointed to the HDD, as well as a Blu Ray Burner. I also have some favorite games on the SSD and others on the HDD, but I was unhappy with the HDD performance for loading. Even Steam has to wait when updating games on the HDD. With games becoming larger and the slow HDD speeds I bought a 500GB 850 Evo to move them all onto. Also, the reads on my 840 Evo have dropped a good bit even after updating and performing the restoration process, so I bought another 500GB Evo to replace it. The mobo has a Intel controller for 6 SATA ports and a ASMedia controller for two others. I wanted to add an SSD for recording and figured I'd just repurpose the 840 for that. I was thinking clone the 840 to one 850 and keep the other 850 as a separate game drive but then I have two 500 GB 850s so maybe RAID 0 and clone to that? Since the ASMedia controller only has two ports, can I do RAID 0 for the two 850s and still plug in the 840 standalone for recording on the Intel controller? I figure the Blu Ray and HDD are slower and would be better on the ASMedia controller. I'm just not sure if I can do RAID 0 and a standalone together on the Intel controller. I also am wondering what sort of issues would I have cloning a single drive to RAID both in general and specifically in my case where things are split between the SSD and HDD. Thanks for your input.

Aimbot69 · June 1, 2015

Yes, you can raid and have additional drives on the Intel controller.

Make frequent backups with a raid 0.

I personally run 2 120GB 850 EVOs in raid 0 for my OS/programs I use very frequently and have a 240GB OCZ Vertex 460 for my game drive and a Seagate 3TB drive for storage. I run bi-daily backups of my raid drive. and all drives are run off my Intel controller.

Captain_WD · June 1, 2015

I currently have an Asus Z87 Sabertooth with a 250GB 840 Evo as the main drive and a 2TB HDD with the Videos, Photos, and Music folders pointed to the HDD, as well as a Blu Ray Burner. I also have some favorite games on the SSD and others on the HDD, but I was unhappy with the HDD performance for loading. Even Steam has to wait when updating games on the HDD. With games becoming larger and the slow HDD speeds I bought a 500GB 850 Evo to move them all onto. Also, the reads on my 840 Evo have dropped a good bit even after updating and performing the restoration process, so I bought another 500GB Evo to replace it. The mobo has a Intel controller for 6 SATA ports and a ASMedia controller for two others. I wanted to add an SSD for recording and figured I'd just repurpose the 840 for that. I was thinking clone the 840 to one 850 and keep the other 850 as a separate game drive but then I have two 500 GB 850s so maybe RAID 0 and clone to that? Since the ASMedia controller only has two ports, can I do RAID 0 for the two 850s and still plug in the 840 standalone for recording on the Intel controller? I figure the Blu Ray and HDD are slower and would be better on the ASMedia controller. I'm just not sure if I can do RAID 0 and a standalone together on the Intel controller. I also am wondering what sort of issues would I have cloning a single drive to RAID both in general and specifically in my case where things are split between the SSD and HDD. Thanks for your input.

Hey beerisyum,

I would proceed with caution with the RAID array. RAID0 provides great speed boost and combines all drives in the array to work as one and appear as one for the OS, but there are also several downsides. RAID0 limits all drives in the array to the smallest in size and to the slowest in terms of speed. It is recommended to use identical drives in order to bring the chances of a drive drop-out to minimum and even then the chances of data corruption and loss are much larger compared to using a single drive. Moreover, RAID0 does not provide any redundancy whatsoever which means if something happens with either of the drives, you would lose all data on the array. RAID0 offers great speed boost but actually increases the cold booting time (the RAID needs to be initialized first) and involves a larger chance of data loss, due to its nature. Using HDDs in RAID makes more sense than using SSDs. Here's an example: games rely on storage only for their loading times and FPS and graphics will not be affected at all. Here's an example of the speed boost when using SSDs and HDDs: The jump in load times from HDD to SSD is like 10s to 1s. RAID 0 effectively (theoretically) halves the load time. So if you were to RAID 0 mechanical drives, it's 10s to 5s. You derive 5s of benefit. If you were to RAID 0 SSDs instead, its like 1s to 0.5s. You derive 0.5s of benefit.

Now if you are still going with RAID0, using a simple cloning software should do the job. The hardware array appears as a single drive for the OS and usually each major manufacturer offers a free cloning software.

I would check the website for it.

Captain_WD.