3 x sata raid 0 ssd - worth it for boot drive?

[Lord Flashheart]

Hi all
I have my i7-3770k system and are looking to upgrade.
I am still looking at my options - amd or intel - which motherboard maker & memory details.
It seems as an expensive propostion whatever I choose due to memory prices.
So I will be looking to use drives I have presently to run the machine.
I have various hard drives, a 120GB ssd and 3 wonderful 60GB V300 SSDs.
I was looking to use the 3 x 60 GB drives in raid 0 for a boot drive.
Is anyone doing anything similar to this?
Any info on boot times or benchmarks anywhere?
Presently with my machine there is a third party chip to provide extra sata III which are not so great so cannot really test. I am interested in performance with a modern chipset.
I am aware if a drive fails then data can be lost but this is intended as a temporary solution. Hopefully an inexpensive optane disk around 200Gb will be avialable to replace them in the not too distant future.
So 3 drives means up to 3 x speed but are curious about random access performance.

Thanks

[ugafan]

the 970 evo suggestion is based on moving to x470 platform, which he is leaning towards.

current prices
860 evo - $80
970 evo - $108

this video is worth watching if you're considering the upgrade.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMfb_kmGLh0

obviously using drives you currently have is the least expensive option, but given the speed increase, this is something to think about.

[maverick]

Originally posted by rotNdude:

Since you seem to have no concerns about the reliability of RAID 0 and you want to use the 3 60GB drives in RAID 0 as a boot drive, I would just do it. Performance won't be extremely better, but it will help a little.

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I have to wonder if people are just parroting what they hear or they had raid 0 issues. I'm going to be upgrading to the amd x470 platform and doing some random searches if there are any differences between the different bus speeds. I'm going to set the record straight for 97% of you that haven't tried raid 0 on ssd's as boot drives and the 2% of you that messed it up. Raid 0 on 3 SSD drives is phenomenal. If you have 3 - 250gb drives in raid 0, it is no more dangerous than having 1 750 gig drive non raid. If the motor dies or the controller dies, you are screwed either way. Just backup your stuff and reinstall. The slowest drive will be the max read/write of the other drives.

I've been running (on my asus m5a99fx pro r2.0 and 8350 cpu) for 5 years 3 crucial mx500 250gb drives in raid 0. Had 0 problems. Before that I ran two m100 crucial 256gb drives in raid 0. 0 issues. I even transferred the two m1 drives to wife's pc and they have been running for a total of 10 years. no issues yet

The drives have not slowed down. To prove it I ran crystal disk mark a few seconds ago. I'm getting 950 read / 854 writes. I have only 13% of drive space left and trim can't pass through the raid controller on this board. I mention this because by now, without trim, my writes should be super slow! Now 950/854 by today's standard is pretty good. But these drives are individually 530/510 writes. It's not a scaling issues it's a bottleneck. On my 2 m100 drives, the raid 0 speed was about the same speed. It's slow because the bus that handle my sata 3 drives tops out at 1gb. On my new board, I should be seeing 1500/1500. Maybe I'll purchase another cheap sata 3 drive and bring it up to 2000/2000 possibly, unless.....the bus speed that the sata connector pass data on is limited again.

To address the risk of corruption, longevity, etc, I've had more power outages that I can remember, the only thing I had to do was run the drive repair tool once in a while to fix ntfs issue. Also, most people back up their stuff to the cloud (backblaze) google photos, alot of games are backed up to the cloud in steam. It's really not a big deal.

Advantages: You can grow your raid 0 drive size with additional drives. I have not done this, but you can bet that as soon as my 3 drives are up and running on my x470 platform, I'm going to see about expanding to 4th ssd drive. I won't have to allocate new drive letters, mess with partitions, all that giant headache.

My games load superfast. My pc boots in 7 seconds. I copy giant amount of pictures at blazing speed. To tell you the truth, I will not go back to regular single drives unless in nvme and more than likely, I'll raid 0 those too if I get the board that handles both nvme at 4x.

[UTFapolloMarine]

create your own windows 10 partitions freshly install windows 10 delete the old w7 partitions, any sdd should be good for what ever mobo. alot of people grab used sdds and dont know how to delete linux, and mac partitions so the get bsod daily!

[maverick]

Originally posted by POUusnavy:

create your own windows 10 partitions freshly install windows 10 delete the old w7 partitions, any sdd should be good for what ever mobo. alot of people grab used sdds and dont know how to delete linux, and mac partitions so the get bsod daily!

5 years ago, I didn't even do a fresh install to the 3 new ssd's. I pulled my my two older ssd's, plugged in my 3 new ssd's and immediately ran benchmarks. This time, it's going to be more complicated, new motherboard, new cpu so it should be interesting when I strip all the drivers, move the drives to the new pc and power it up. If it boots without bsod, I'll get a chance to load the drivers. If it bsods, I'll reinstall windows 10 and my stuff. I've got a usb 3.0 external drive that has my compressed files, so in 30 minutes I should be good to go.

[UTFapolloMarine]

Originally posted by maverick:

Originally posted by POUusnavy:

create your own windows 10 partitions freshly install windows 10 delete the old w7 partitions, any sdd should be good for what ever mobo. alot of people grab used sdds and dont know how to delete linux, and mac partitions so the get bsod daily!

5 years ago, I didn't even do a fresh install to the 3 new ssd's. I pulled my my two older ssd's, plugged in my 3 new ssd's and immediately ran benchmarks. This time, it's going to be more complicated, new motherboard, new cpu so it should be interesting when I strip all the drivers, move the drives to the new pc and power it up. If it boots without bsod, I'll get a chance to load the drivers. If it bsods, I'll reinstall windows 10 and my stuff. I've got a usb 3.0 external drive that has my compressed files, so in 30 minutes I should be good to go.

exactly! just format the partitions and delete all of them when you re install windows 10, the sdd will whipe any Ex data from older windows and be fully compatible with new windows 10 updates! good luck

[[☥] - CJ -]

This is an old thread guys...

[UTFapolloMarine]

Originally posted by POUusnavy:

Originally posted by maverick:

5 years ago, I didn't even do a fresh install to the 3 new ssd's. I pulled my my two older ssd's, plugged in my 3 new ssd's and immediately ran benchmarks. This time, it's going to be more complicated, new motherboard, new cpu so it should be interesting when I strip all the drivers, move the drives to the new pc and power it up. If it boots without bsod, I'll get a chance to load the drivers. If it bsods, I'll reinstall windows 10 and my stuff. I've got a usb 3.0 external drive that has my compressed files, so in 30 minutes I should be good to go.

exactly! just format the partitions and delete all of them when you re install windows 10, the sdd will whipe any Ex data from older windows and be fully compatible with new windows 10 updates! good luck

oh yes and you may need to take out your bios battery for 11 seconds if it doesnt boot or load. sometimes you may need to even take out all hdd or sdd to get to bios sometimes good luck