SSD in Raid 0 and m.2?

[Austroknot]

Hello, so here's my (probably dumb) questions.

 

I plan on getting two Samsung 1TB 850 Pro in RAID 0 Config as well as a Seagate HDD for backup storage. I was wondering if I buy one SSD and the HDD, then add the second SSD in RAID 0 later, will it automatically reconfigure the data and allocate it to both SSD's or must I wipe the data, put it in raid 0, then copy the data from my backup HDD so that all the data i had on just the one SSD up until that point is in RAID 0?

 

As for my other inquiry; Do you think getting an M.2 NVME SSD is more worth it than a SATA SSD in your opinion? Is there any cons to M.2/SSD that might turn people away on either option?

 

Thanks 

[Vigilante505]

Yes. Raid is also not as important unless you're doing a backup drive. My M.2 is a lot faster than my SSD.

[Zyndo]

When you set up a RAID configuration it wipes the drives clean of all information. No way around that as far as i know.

 

As far as NVME vs SATA SSD RAID 0, you will typically get more capacity and longer life spans out of RAID 0, but typically much faster speeds out of an M.2. Of course this can change depending on the drives you select, but this is typically what you're looking at.

[Austroknot]

22 minutes ago, Zyndo said:

When you set up a RAID configuration it wipes the drives clean of all information. No way around that as far as i know.

 

As far as NVME vs SATA SSD RAID 0, you will typically get more capacity and longer life spans out of RAID 0, but typically much faster speeds out of an M.2. Of course this can change depending on the drives you select, but this is typically what you're looking at.

Well I plan on doing mostly gaming on my pc as well as some editing/music stuff. Will getting a fast m.2 be giving me noticeably more performance or is it not really worth it for a more gaming-focused build?

[Zyndo]

2 hours ago, Austosaur said:

Well I plan on doing mostly gaming on my pc as well as some editing/music stuff. Will getting a fast m.2 be giving me noticeably more performance or is it not really worth it for a more gaming-focused build?

The only thing storage speeds will help in with gaming is load screen speeds. Games will almost entirely be run off of your system memory. the memory will pull any information it deems relevant to the game or information that you may encounter in the game. The only time storage speeds make a difference is when you encounter something the memory didn't/cant predict (such as loading a new map, level, or room in your game). For this purpose you want a drive with high sequential read speeds to see the shortest load times and the best gaming impact.

 

But if you don't care about loading screen times you don't need to worry about RAID 0 or NVME drives. That being said, Intel recently released an excellent M.2 NVME drive for this exact purpose, the Intel 600P. If you get it in a 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB drive capacity (this drive's performance scales with size, and the 128GB drive is too slow to justify its price). It is priced very competitively with a high end SATA drive like a 850 evo/pro, and performs very similarly across the board except when it comes to sequential write performance. You can expect to see up to 3x more performance on sequential writes on the 600p.

 

Here is a link to that M.2: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167412&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-PCPartPicker, LLC-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID=

 

The 512GB and 1TB drives perform better than their SATA counterparts across the board if that is more your style (since this 600p performance gets better the larger its capacity). They will beat any RAID 0 SATA drives in sequential reads, and they don't come with the massive pricetag of something like a 950 PRO (although they aren't nearly as good as a 950 PRO)

 

Bottom line is storage speeds don't really matter for gaming (with the exception of shorter loading screens) but since an Intel 600p isn't really that much more expensive than a SATA drive of a similar size and it IS quite a bit better for your workload, it might be worth looking into if you have the budget.

[Zyndo]

Looking at prices on PCpartpicker.com it looks like the 512GB 600p is a bit more expensive than a 500GB 850 EVO, and a bit less expensive than the 500GB 850 PRO. It performs significantly better than both, and is over 3x faster when it comes to sequential read speeds (about 25% faster in the other areas). If you have a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot, you should consider this option =)

[Captain_WD]

11 hours ago, Austosaur said:

~snip~

Hello Welcome to the community from me! 

 

On top of what the guys mentioned, here are a few points from me: 

- SATA connection limits all drivers (regardless if they are HDD or SSD) at a maximum of 600MB/s so if you get a SATAIII SSD you won't be seeing more than 550MB/s - 580MB/s. RAID0 does give you a decent boost to those speeds of about 70%-80% or even more (depending on the controller) but it mostly affects sequential speeds and has a rather little effect on the random speeds which matter a lot in day-to-day usage. NVMe SSDs on the other hand can give you far better speeds even comapred to two SATA SSDs in RAID0.

 

- Gaming itself doesn't rely on the storage's performance for anything besides the loading times. You won't see any difference in the graphics' quality or the FPS regardless if you run a game off a simple HDD, RAID0 SSDs or even PCIe NVMe SSD. The only difference would be the speed and smoothness that the surrounding textures in some open world or MMO games load but again that won't affect their quality nor the FPS itself.

 

- In terms of reliability, though the same amount of data would be distributed across multiple drives in a RAID0 array, drives placed in such environment are  put under additional stress and are more likely to drop out of the array or corrupt data compared to single standalone drives. 

 

- Mind also that you need to check if TRIM will work when you enable your RAID controller and place multiple SSDs in a RAID array. 

 

Captain_WD. 

[MattJenko]

Have the 256GB Intel 600p, can confirm is awesome. The only other disk I would go for is the Samsung 950pro, but for gaming your main bottleneck is loading times, and the read speed of the 600p is easily enough to negate it as a bottleneck - faster even than RAID'd 850 evo/pro.

 

Mine is installed in a VM host, and will be used as the system drive of the various VM's I run, also works great in that regard as read speed is more important than write - have other drives in that machine for the writing part.

[Ryujin2003]

On 09/22/2016 at 10:00 PM, Austosaur said:

Well I plan on doing mostly gaming on my pc as well as some editing/music stuff. Will getting a fast m.2 be giving me noticeably more performance or is it not really worth it for a more gaming-focused build?

No m.2 for this. Not unless you've got some massive m.2 for your music, games, and OS. Otherwise, m.w is great for OS and basic programs and maybe the occasional game depending on storage size. SSD RAID 0 will definitely help with music editing, as it'll help with load and save times, but the current open stuff you're editing will be in RAM.

 

Last thing to consider. If you're doing anything important, if a single SDD fails in RAID 0, all of the information is gone.

 

RAID 0 will let you keep your capacity, so x2 1TB drives will be recognized as x1 2TB drive. That will be a plus.

 

I have RAID 0 for my main storage, and my read/writes are much faster than my standalone SSD, and much more speed than my mechanical drives.

 

I'd stay away from m.2 for music editing. It'll get expensive to support large storage volumes. Plus the only performance is in read and writes. It won't make your PC process anything like edits faster.

[MattJenko]

12 hours ago, Ryujin2003 said:

No m.2 for this. Not unless you've got some massive m.2 for your music, games, and OS. Otherwise, m.w is great for OS and basic programs and maybe the occasional game depending on storage size. SSD RAID 0 will definitely help with music editing, as it'll help with load and save times, but the current open stuff you're editing will be in RAM.

 

Last thing to consider. If you're doing anything important, if a single SDD fails in RAID 0, all of the information is gone.

 

RAID 0 will let you keep your capacity, so x2 1TB drives will be recognized as x1 2TB drive. That will be a plus.

 

I have RAID 0 for my main storage, and my read/writes are much faster than my standalone SSD, and much more speed than my mechanical drives.

 

I'd stay away from m.2 for music editing. It'll get expensive to support large storage volumes. Plus the only performance is in read and writes. It won't make your PC process anything like edits faster.

Depending on budget, but the Intel 600p 512GB is only AUD $259, $469 for 1TB at my local store, compared to the 850 Pro @ $219 or the 950 Pro M.2 at $384.

 

The 950pro is a lot faster than the 600p, but the 600p is WAAAY faster than the the 850pro or evo, especially in reads. In fact, it will even compete with 850evo in RAID0.

 

I would go a large disk for bulk data, then if you have space issues on the SSD copy the files to the SSD before you start working with them - kind of like a scratch disk. Do this on my MBP for photography, as it only has 256GB.