2 Different SSDs...

[Andrew83]

Hi. Forgive me if this questions has been asked before, but I'm looking to expand my storage with a second SSD. I have a 120 GB Corsair Force GT SSD (Model F120GBGT-BK). It's split in to 2 partitions and reaching its limit between the OS on one and games on the other.

I have an Asus Rampage 4 Extreme mobo with 4 SATA 6Gb/s connectors. I believe the controllers are split 2 Intel / 2 ASMedia.

I'm considering dropping in a Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD (MZ-7TE250BW) and moving my games and maybe a few higher end art programs (Maya, ZBrush, etc) over to that and just leaving the 120 GB Corsair dedicated to the OS (Windows 7).

My question is, are there any potential problems that I might run into with the controllers? I'm obviously not looking to raid them since they are different capacities & brands. I'm just looking for a little extra storage with the benefit of SSD speed.

Thanks,
Andrew

 

[GotNoRice]

I'm just looking for a little extra storage with the benefit of SSD speed.

Move your games over to one of your mechanical drives and use the former games partition on the SSD as a cache partition for Intel SRT. Works great.

 

[Tsumi]

No, there shouldn't be any problems. If I were you, I would run all Intel controllers (regardless of how many SSDs you're using) until you run out of Intel controller ports to use. Then add onto the Asmedia.

The reason being is that SATA III offers very little in terms of performance improvement over SATA II for SSDs outside of large file transfers. And that when you add in the Asmedia controller, bios startup times are generally longer.

 

[Andrew83]

GotNoRice, can you explain exactly what the purpose of that is? I'm not too familiar with using a partition as a cache. SSD technology is rather new to me.

Tsumi, so am I correct in assuming from your comment then, that a 3rd party controller is going to be slower than an Intel one?

 

[Tsumi]

It'll either be equivocal or slower. But the point is during boot, the board would have to initialize the controller before booting. Whereas if there is nothing connected to it, it skips over initializing the controller.

 

[Andrew83]

At this point, I think I only have one free SATA port open on the motherboard, an ASMedia one, so it would seem that it is initializing it at every time I boot anyway.

Thank you for the responses & help guys.

 

[Zepher]

My current setup uses a 120gb ssd for the OS and my smaller apps, 250gb ssd for my adobe suite and my main games, and the rest of my games on a 2TB WD Black drive. I am using all 8 or 9 sata ports so my boot up times are a little slow.

 

[GotNoRice]

GotNoRice, can you explain exactly what the purpose of that is? I'm not too familiar with using a partition as a cache. SSD technology is rather new to me.

Basically, you can use an SSD, or a partition of an SSD (up to 64GB Max) as cache, and you assign that to a specific mechanical drive, or a raid array made up of mechanical drives.

It's pretty simple really, and works at the block level (instead of the file level, etc). The first time a block is accessed, it is read from the mechanical hard drive (at mechanical hard drive speeds), and cached onto the SSD at that same time. The 2nd time that block is accessed, it is accessed from the SSD. So for example, let's say I just installed windows onto a mechanical drive and enabled Intel SRT caching on that drive. The first reboot afterward will show almost no improvement (as nothing has been cached yet). The 2nd reboot will be lightning fast, as if you were booting from the SSD directly, because almost everything has been cached at that point. When the cache becomes full, the oldest block is kicked out of cache to make room for new data. You can pretty much count on anything you use regularly to be cached, and anything else, it will just be that first time that is slow. I run two 1TB Western Digital Black drives in Raid:0 and use a 64GB partition on a Samsung 840 120GB drive as cache. It works great as I can just toss stuff on that drive with almost no regard for space, yet everything on there that I actually access regularly I still access at SSD speeds

More info if you're still interested: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/intel-z68-chipset-smart-response-technology-ssd-caching-review/2

 

[Andrew83]

What you just described basically sounds like an SSHD. A little similar in purpose to a RAM disk as well, in using a faster piece of hardware to get more speed that a traditional mechanical hard drive. I've read that SSDs have a limited amount of read / writes to them. What kind of effect does this setup have on the life of the drive?

 

[drescherjm]

I've read that SSDs have a limited amount of read / writes to them.

Small (32GB) ones possibly. For larger ones this myth has been long busted. I mean you can write 20GB a day every single day for 5 years and still not come close to wearing out a modern SSD. For a Samsung 850 the number will be decades of writing every single day.

 

[GotNoRice]

What you just described basically sounds like an SSHD. A little similar in purpose to a RAM disk as well, in using a faster piece of hardware to get more speed that a traditional mechanical hard drive. I've read that SSDs have a limited amount of read / writes to them. What kind of effect does this setup have on the life of the drive?

Insignificant in terms of the overall life of the SSD. My 840 that I've been using as cache for a year or more still only has about 1TB written over the life of the SSD. SSDs that actually wear out usually have writes measured in Petabytes.