MX100 2x512 vs 850 PRO 2x512

I'm just about to pull the trigger on new SSD array. TLC stuff is out of question, just because it's TLC and we still don't know if the issue from 840 Evo is just Evo limited or TLC bug (as standard 840 SSDs also show up with some problems).

I've two choices - 850 Pro 2x512: the fastest, the best and so on. Cost though it's 2500 PLN ($800) and 2x512 MX100 - 1600 PLN - $500. My PC is mostly for gaming, along with text editing - I don't encode blurays or do any coding.

10 years warranty is not an issue, because I believe that in 3 years time the current SSDs will become obsolete, and we will see surge of M2/SATA Express drives.

I'm more bend on getting the MX100 array, as I doubt the speed difference will be noticeable and worth $300 more. Or will it?

If all you care about is speed then you won't notice a difference.

In real-life gaming, you won't even notice a speed difference between a single SSD and two in RAID.. SSD RAID is great for benchmarks but for normal "desktop" single user usage, you aren't going to see any human perceptual difference in performance. Neither gaming nor text editing is going to stress out a single current generation SSD. Your PC won't even boot noticeably faster with RAID. And this is coming from a guy with a 8x1TbSSD in RAID10 connected to a 12Gb/s caching SAS controller (which actually adds significant time to the boot times).

Even with video editing (my usage limited to encoding to different formats and cheapo software), With a single SSD, I am still CPU 4-core processing limited (on a [email protected]) more than I am I/O limited on a single SSD. I get more video editing processing speed on my old hex core [email protected] and a single SSD than on my 4790K rig with a big SSD RAID simply because it has an extra 2 cores and quad channel memory to process the junk even though it's IPC is slower than the newer CPU. A single SSD loads the video data faster than the CPU can process the video conversion anyway.

Your particular usage is not going to warrant a SSD RAID. Sure do it for fun and benchmarks, but don't expect real-world usage performance to show a noticeable difference. It might even be worse with RAID, because it's real easy for the drives to get out of sync on a normal PC without UPS's and crappy game software or overclocked video card induced BSOD's so the system is constantly rebuilding the RAID.

Thanks for the great info on raid and ssd. Guess I'll just get a single 1tb drive and won't look back at raid. Will wait then few days for 850 evo to see how it looks and get propably it.