850 Evo Raid 0

[Klasta]

Because I'm buying a new laptop next week, I am going to take out the 500gb 850 Evo I put in my current laptop and place it in my desktop. My desktop already has a 500gb 850 evo. Is there any reason not to put them in raid 0?
It would be used exclusively to host my steam library so reliability is not really an issue as far as I'm concerned.

[scottyseng]

Does the new laptop have a ssd? You might consider putting it in there instead.

 

otherwise, there's nothing wrong with raid 0, just understand you might see performance drops offer time and will be unable to see smart data. I would keep them separate just to not deal with the potential issues or raid0. It you do it, make sure you have a good backup system in place.

[bgibbz]

14 minutes ago, Klasta said:

Because I'm buying a new laptop next week, I am going to take out the 500gb 850 Evo I put in my current laptop and place it in my desktop. My desktop already has a 500gb 850 evo. Is there any reason not to put them in raid 0?
It would be used exclusively to host my steam library so reliability is not really an issue as far as I'm concerned.

I'm in the same boat as you lol. I have a 500gb 850 evo in my desktop, and I put another 500gb 850 evo in my laptop 6 months ago. I just ordered a new laptop which will come in in about 2 weeks, and because the new laptop has an ssd in it I was going to put it in raid 0. It should be fine, but of course you need to be aware of the issues with raid 0. You should get much faster read and write speeds, but you double your chance of failure and data loss. Essentially, don't put any priceless family albums on it and have a backup system in place. 

[Klasta]

8 hours ago, scottyseng said:

Does the new laptop have a ssd? You might consider putting it in there instead.

 

otherwise, there's nothing wrong with raid 0, just understand you might see performance drops offer time and will be unable to see smart data. I would keep them separate just to not deal with the potential issues or raid0. It you do it, make sure you have a good backup system in place.

Yeah it has it's own 500gb unspecified 2.5" SSD.
And what kind of performance drops over time do you mean? Does putting them in raid 0 speed up their degradation a lot or is it due to something else?

[scottyseng]

1 hour ago, Klasta said:

Yeah it has it's own 500gb unspecified 2.5" SSD.
And what kind of performance drops over time do you mean? Does putting them in raid 0 speed up their degradation a lot or is it due to something else?

Depending on which RAID controller you use, some do not support TRIM. Due to this, the speeds of the SSDs drop over time. If you're using the onboard Intel RAID controller, you should be fine. However, I'm just stating that for other RAID controllers.

 

Also, scaling isn't 100% either. You don't get the full speed of both drives, but it depends on the RAID controller to see what kind of scaling you get with having two drives in RAID0. Personally I'd keep them separate, as you get to use them both separately at full speed (You can also use RAPID mode...I think that's disabled if you use the Evos in RAID).

 

It's all up to preference though. You'll see endless threads on RAID0 vs keeping them separate here. There are pros and cons to both.

[Klasta]

Ok, thank you!