RAID 0 fail help?

[TheNaitsyrk]

Hiho people,

I did RAID 0 6 months back, and it failed for no reason recently. I sent my SSDs 2x to Kingston and one turned out to be fake (papa bless E-Bay), and Kingston said that I need two SSDs with the exact same firmware, but I bought one on Amazon and they're still different after receiving a replacement. Will I be okay with two different SSDs in RAID 0? (I'm getting a refund for the fake one) Will the speeds be decent or should I just use the drives separately?

 

(It is impossible for me to get an identical drive to the one I had received from Kingston because no one around sells the Kingston V300 ones and online sellers refused to specify the firmware which is literally written in the front of the package)

[Oshino Shinobu]

I would take the refund and buy something other than a V300 (Kingston did a bait and switch with the NAND, making them significantly slower than the first revisions). 

 

RAID 0 is a bad idea in general. Use the drives separate, that's what I'd recommend. 

[TheNaitsyrk]

7 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

I would take the refund and buy something other than a V300 (Kingston did a bait and switch with the NAND, making them significantly slower than the first revisions). 

 

RAID 0 is a bad idea in general. Use the drives separate, that's what I'd recommend. 

Well, it'd look messy to have 4 drives on my PC. I wanted RAID for quicker boot and stuff. I can return only one so I'd still be stuck with 1x V300 so I have no choice to keep it.

[Oshino Shinobu]

20 minutes ago, TheNaitsyrk said:

Well, it'd look messy to have 4 drives on my PC. I wanted RAID for quicker boot and stuff. I can return only one so I'd still be stuck with 1x V300 so I have no choice to keep it.

RAID 0 will likely slow down or negate any speed benefits for booting. The RAID controller has to initialise and the array needs to be established before the OS can be loaded. Without RAID, these steps don't need to be performed. Transfer speeds may increase, but that's provided you have other drives that can match the RAID 0 array in terms of speed. If not, you're just getting the speeds of whatever drive you're transferring to/from. Loading into RAM will be faster, but there's not too many applications where the speed benefit will gain you much, other than slightly lower load times. 

[TheNaitsyrk]

2 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

RAID 0 will likely slow down or negate any speed benefits for booting. The RAID controller has to initialise and the array needs to be established before the OS can be loaded. Without RAID, these steps don't need to be performed. Transfer speeds may increase, but that's provided you have other drives that can match the RAID 0 array in terms of speed. If not, you're just getting the speeds of whatever drive you're transferring to/from. Loading into RAM will be faster, but there's not too many applications where the speed benefit will gain you much, other than slightly lower load times. 

What's your suggestion in this case? I bought the SSD for esthetics as well. Should I just install it on one SSD and have 2nd SSD used for something else?

 

I had a laptop with 120SSD in RAID 0 and it was booting in literally seconds, I know it wasn't an X99 system but still, my X99 system takes one minute to boot and I only have dual channel and not quad channel.

[Oshino Shinobu]

19 minutes ago, TheNaitsyrk said:

What's your suggestion in this case? I bought the SSD for esthetics as well. Should I just install it on one SSD and have 2nd SSD used for something else?

 

I had a laptop with 120SSD in RAID 0 and it was booting in literally seconds, I know it wasn't an X99 system but still, my X99 system takes one minute to boot and I only have dual channel and not quad channel.

I would just have one SSD for OS and main applications and any other SSDs for whatever you want on them. Probably games or some extra applications. I know all about buying multiple small SSDs for aesthetics. I currently have 3x Samsung 840 EVO 250GB drives while I could have gotten a 1TB drive for around the same price, I just wanted three of them to mount in my case to look good.

 

Laptops tend to boot fast from what I've seen, sometimes because the board/BIOS is designed to minimise pre-boot displays and options and sometimes because the laptop isn't actually off, it's just in a low power state. My laptop, which has a single 250GB SSD that's slower than my 840 EVOs in pretty much every way, boots a good 5 seconds quicker than my desktop.   

 

If you have dual channel, that means you have 2x 16GB DIMMs, right? (going off your signature). Out of interest, why go for 16GB DIMMs? Personally, I like having as many of the RAM slots filled as possible. 

 

My reason for buying multiple small SSDs:

 

[TheNaitsyrk]

1 minute ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

I would just have one SSD for OS and main applications and any other SSDs for whatever you want on them. Probably games or some extra applications. I know all about buying multiple small SSDs for aesthetics. I currently have 3x Samsung 850 EVO 250GB drives while I could have gotten a 1TB drive for around the same price, I just wanted three of them to mount in my case to look good.

 

Laptops tend to boot fast from what I've seen, sometimes because the board/BIOS is designed to minimise pre-boot displays and options and sometimes because the laptop isn't actually off, it's just in a low power state. My laptop, which has a single 250GB SSD that's slower than my 850 EVOs in pretty much every way, boots a good 5 seconds quicker than my desktop.   

 

If you have dual channel, that means you have 2x 16GB DIMMs, right? (going off your signature). Out of interest, why go for 16GB DIMMs? Personally, I like having as many of the RAM slots filled as possible. 

 

My reason for buying multiple small SSDs:

 

Good idea, I will probably do just that OS on one, and main programs on the other one and 500GB SSD for games. Regarding the DIMMS, I was thinking to upgrade in the future, so this way each slot has the maximum amount of RAM possible. We have similar amount of SSD space, I have 120+120+500GB SSD EVO.

 

You're still on Z77? Woah dude, time to upgrade.

 

Thank you for explaining why laptops boot faster, I actually didn't know that.

[Oshino Shinobu]

8 minutes ago, TheNaitsyrk said:

Good idea, I will probably do just that OS on one, and main programs on the other one and 500GB SSD for games. Regarding the DIMMS, I was thinking to upgrade in the future, so this way each slot has the maximum amount of RAM possible. We have similar amount of SSD space, I have 120+120+500GB SSD EVO.

 

You're still on Z77? Woah dude, time to upgrade.

 

Thank you for explaining why laptops boot faster, I actually didn't know that.

System was built about 3 years ago and haven't really changed or felt the need to change anything yet. Only thing I've really added to the system (and technically not even to the system) is about 10TB more storage in a NAS. 3770K is still plenty powerful for most things. Maybe next CPU generation I'll look into upgrading to a new platform, but that will probably be a complete system rebuild as I'll have to change the heart of the system anyway. 

 

I do have plans for the complete rebuild, inspired by LTT's desk design but modified slightly and held together in a more practical way (crossdowels rather than glue). Stuff is expensive though, so I'd rather spend it on a new car or motorcycle than a £7000 computer that I don't really need (:

 

[TheNaitsyrk]

1 minute ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

System was built about 3 years ago and haven't really changed or felt the need to change anything yet. Only thing I've really added to the system (and technically not even to the system) is about 10TB more storage in a NAS. 3770K is still plenty powerful for most things. Maybe next CPU generation I'll look into upgrading to a new platform, but that will probably be a complete system rebuild as I'll have to change the heart of the system anyway. 

 

I do have plans for the complete rebuild, inspired by LTT's desk design but modified slightly and held together in a more practical way (crossdowels rather than glue). Stuff is expensive though, so I'd rather spend it on a new car and motorcycle than a £7000 computer that I don't really need (:

 

That's fair. I have two systems, and I bought one with 4670K for 1080p gaming (it's a mini system, which looks good and has nice specs) and the second system is basically an overkill with 1080 TI and 6800K OC to hopefully 4.5Ghz. I know what you mean by spending way too much money on a system like that.