(2) 120GB SSDs Raid 0 or (1) 240GB SSD

[Enkidu]

I am wondering which would provide better performance, since either will cost me about the same.

[Spawn of Totoro]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/kigston-hyperx-ssd-raid0_7.html#sect0

"Unfortunately, our today’s tests do not provide a clear answer to the question if building a RAID0 out of modern SSDs makes sense. This solution has its highs and lows and we can only do as much as lost them all and let you be the decision maker.

RAID0 is a traditional method of boosting your disk subsystem performance. The trick works with SSDs, too. Combining two SSDs into a RAID0 helps increase linear read/write speeds as well as the speed of processing small data blocks at a long request queue. We did notch very impressive sequential read and write speeds in our tests, getting much higher than the SATA 6 Gbit/s bandwidth.

However, we should keep it in mind that modern SSDs have a tendency to get faster as their capacity grows even within the same product series, so a two-disk RAID0 may turn out to be slower than a single large-capacity SSD. More importantly, SATA RAID controllers, including those in modern chipsets, do not support the TRIM command. As a result, the array’s writing performance degrades over time whereas single SSDs are less susceptible to this problem.

Thus, a RAID0 will only be superior to a single SSD at linear operations whereas random-address operations will expose its weakness. That’s why we can’t prefer the RAID0 solution to a single SSD without reservations. On the other hand, most of our lifelike benchmarks do show the RAID0 to be overall faster. In other words, the RAID0 is better on average, especially as it doesn’t involve any investment: the cost per gigabyte is the same for a RAID0 and an SSD of the same capacity.

There is some inconvenience about running an SSD RAID0 that should also be mentioned. You cannot monitor the health of your SSDs in a RAID0 or update their firmware. A RAID0 will also have lower reliability since a failure of any SSD causes the loss of all data stored on all the SSDs in the array."

Hope this answers your question.

Personaly, I prefer a 128GB SSD for my OS and a 3TB for everything else. I don't get the fastest loading, but it still loads after then just a HDD.

[Enkidu]

Thank you for your response but this just reinforces my inability to make a decision.

I have a 120GB SSD for OS, a 1TB HDD for programs (games), and a 2TB for media right now

[Spawn of Totoro]

Basicaly you get no real gains from going to a raid 0 wilth two SSDs. Just stick with the one.

[Jamebonds1]

I would not going to RAID 0 if i were you. It has a highest failure rate. I was in college geek club. Some of those say they saw many of raid 0 have fail and loss data by failed hard drive. RAID 10 is pretty good and is anti loss data. RAID 1 also is good but not increase speed. If one hard drive via RAID 1, your data is saved.

[Xenotoz]

Yeah, for SSDs you would be better off with just one SSD because two have a higher fail rate and also you won't get much of an improvement.

[rotNdude]

I don't see RAID0 as providing much benefit at all with SSDs, other than the additional capacity it provides with one volume. RAID0 helps quite a bit with two mechanical hard drives.

[Enkidu]

uno ssd it is

[*Funky-Chicken*]

i use ocz aglity 3 2x120gb in RAID0 for over a year. No problems don't know if it would make a difference if it wasn't RAID0 and don't care as long as it works

[DisposableDemon]

I'm using 2 Kingston 120GB HyperX SSDs in RAID0 right now. Been using them for quite some time. No issues. Super fast. Couldn't be happier.

[Spawn of Totoro]

DisposableDemon původně napsal:

I'm using 2 Kingston 120GB HyperX SSDs in RAID0 right now. Been using them for quite some time. No issues. Super fast. Couldn't be happier.

The link I posted didn't say it wouldn't work, just that it isn't any faster, overall then one drive. Some parts may run faster while others may run slower. It balances out.

Remember, a traditional HDD needs to locate the data on the platter by moving a head to that area. A SSD doesn't have to search and read. It knows where the data is and can bring it up almost instantly.

A raid0 would have the HDDs search and transfer at the same time, There isn't much point in it with an SSD.

[tuxxor]

If reliability of SSDs in RAID0 is an issue, a nice solution would be to lazily mirror that RAID0 volume to a partition on a standard mechanical hard drive, and in fact some people do that (often that hard drive is actually in a different machine, and mirrored over a network).

For example, on Linux if you add a RAID1 member with --write-mostly and --write-behind options, that drive will not serve read requests unless the other drive(s) (in this case SSDs) are busy, and will not block writes unless it's too far behind (configurable), so you get SSD read speed, close to SSD write speed, and protection in case of failure.

Some posts about this approach:

http://www.vinsec.net/2012/05/hybrid-hdd-ssd-raid1.html
http://tansi.info/hybrid/

Unfortunately I am not aware of any Windows RAID solutions having such options.

Also, most RAID solutions do not support TRIM, which may cause SSD performance to degrade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM#RAID_issues). On Linux a proper TRIM support on RAID (without manually running a special tool) is available only since the recently released 3.7 kernel.