SSD Raid 0

Doing a new build and I'm going to be in the position of having two sets of matching SSD's.

• 2 X Samsung 850 EVO 1TB
• 2 X Kingston HyperX 240 GB

I was wondering if it would be worth my time to do RAID 0 on the two 240GB drives as the OS drive. Are the real world speed benefits noticeable? Do you lose the benefits of TRIM in that configuration?

Link to the build

Are the real world speed benefits noticeable?

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For the OS drive expect slightly higher latency and longer boots with RAID0 versus a single drive. Although recovering from a hibernation file will probably be faster.

No.

SSD's are fast enough that an OS will benefits 0 from Raid 0, and really very few things will benefit with Raid 0 SSD unless your doing massive multi-media work or working with large files a lot moving them around.

MrGuvernment said:

No.

SSD's are fast enough that an OS will benefits 0 from Raid 0, and really very few things will benefit with Raid 0 SSD unless your doing massive multi-media work or working with large files a lot moving them around.

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I agree, this is just a waist of money becasue you will not see any benefit

I'm actually running a pair of 840s in raid 0 for my primary drive, and while I notice the speed boost on occasion (500 MB/s -> 800 MB/s), the really noticeable benefit is that you have a larger logical drive. Since you've got those 1tb drives anyways, I wouldn't bother.

Just get a single 500gb ssd and call it, there is no real life benefits for usual task users on raid0 ssds, and you double the chance of losings it, not worth it.

The only time you will notice any benefits are when you transfer large (and I mean LARGE) files that can benefit from the higher read / write speeds from the RAID array. I've had 2 drive, 3 drive and even 4 drive SSD arrays and unless you are benchmarking, your "butt dyno" won't be able to tell the difference most of the time.

Admittedly, there are some poorly coded apps / games with loading screens which might benefit but in routine use / programs - there won't be any difference. That's the reason I switched to a PCI-E setup for my "fast / gaming" drive and a single SSD for my boot.

Your SSD already uses RAID0 internally - or interleaving - so having two modern SSDs in RAID0 is like moving from a 16-disk RAID0 to a 32-disk RAID0.

Your SSD array will get faster - up to twice as fast for both sequential and random I/O - but it cannot improve the most important performance spec: random blocking reads. For desktops this is the most important spec.

A single SSD is already very fast. You will have a hard time noticing any difference between a current modern SSD and an infinitely fast SSD. You can do this test yourself:

1) reboot
2) launch application or game, note the time it takes to start with stopwatch
3) close the application, wait a few seconds and launch the same app again. Notice the speed difference

The second time you launch the same application it will be faster due to filecache - you will read from RAM memory instead of SSD. No SSD will ever be faster than this, so any performance benefit will be limited to the difference between the time difference between steps 2 and 3.

For SATA/600 SSDs, having two SSDs in RAID0 can actually improve noticeable performance in some cases, such as launching games. But the difference is marginal. Because it is free though, you can consider it. Though your boot times may suffer a bit due to boot ROM initialisation. After boot it will be faster. The added latency by RAID0 processing is negligible.

For Intel onboard RAID (RST) you will keep TRIM support on Z68 and later chipsets. So personally i do like the overkill of a RAID0 configuration because it doesn't cost you anything and still provides a small benefit.

Most people view doing Raid0 with SSDs as a bad thing, because there is little to no real-world performance benefit in most situations, but that ignores one simple core benefit of Raid0: The capacity of the drives will be combined. I would contend that for most users, a single logical 256GB drive would be more useful than two 128GB drives, and a single logical 512GB drive would be more useful than two 256GB drives, etc. Having to micromanage which drive each of your games is stored on so that there is enough space, etc, is a pain in the ass. In some cases, it can allow you to make use of drives that would not really be useful on their own, like throwing 4 64GB SSDs together in Raid0. Whereas 64GB is too small, both in terms of it's size and it's slow speeds, 4 in Raid0 would give you 256GB of usable space and since 64GB SSDs tends to be slower, it would probably increase performance as well.

I would never recommend buying two smaller drives vs a single faster drive or anything like that, but if you already have the drives and are just trying to make use of them, or if you already have a single drive and have a chance to buy a 2nd identical drive for very cheap, raid0 can be a useful option.

If people want a single larger volume, buying a bigger SSD is the easiest. Also JBOD - also known as concatenating or spanning - will do the same thing, but without the performance benefit RAID0 offers.

I in fact do recommend considering buying two smaller SSDs. Besides the small performance increase and next to zero increased cost, you have the opportunity to split them later and use them for two systems. So if you buy 2x 250GB for your main rig right now, you can use them as two 250GB SSDs separately in the future, something a single 500GB SSD is incapable of. A smaller SSD is still very useful as system / OS drive so size is less important than a HDD for mass storage. In fact, i still use my Intel 40GB SSDs - they are still awesome.

_CiPHER_ said:

In fact, i still use my Intel 40GB SSDs - they are still awesome.

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I have a pair of 22GB Intel SSD's that are still in service.