4 SSD raid 0 - worth it?

T

TeleFragger

[H]ard|Gawd
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Ok so as you have seen I just got a slight taste of SSD with my n00b posts and greatly appreciate the help..

so now a side question that im going to possibly test here at work for messing around sakes..

128gb ssd is small. I see posts about 2 SSD Raid 0 but what about 4? I understand there is limitation on the controller side but what is the limitation? so 4 would be nice for 4 x 128gb as a large C: running windows 10 but will there be any speed benfit after 2 drives?

thanks for humoring my silly thought...
 
I doubt you'll see any noticeable benefits over a single drive unless you just do big file transfers all day. Even going to a pci-e/nvme drive doesn't provide much benefit to home users.

I don't see any problem with pooling old drives for capacity. I have 4 old 64gb ssds raid0'd together as a games drive. I wouldn't put my OS or any critical data on an array like that. Save up and get yourself one big OS disk.
 
ok... yeah this machine is used to play games (nothing intense) and photoshop/lightroom/premiere
 
You will see greater sequential reads/writes and sometimes (controller dependent) lower latency.

Not much more than that.

I for one have 4x250gb Evo 840 on raid 0 for gaming and stuff.
 
Advantage: 4x128GB = 512GB + read and write speed
Cons: failure of one drive = NO DATA
 
you can do high speed high queue depth 4K but thats only relevant in a very small amount of stuff.

Essentially if your asking if RAID 0 will help you the answer is almost always no. Its one of those things you'll know if it does help you because it is such a small subset of people that it helps.
 
I've been thinking about this myself. I just got my hands on a handful (5)x 1TB SSDs and have been trying to figure out what to do with them. Between the 3 boxes in my sig and a few laptops sitting around the house I could go all out and put them into one box in a RAID 10 (2x RAID 0) with 4 drives with the capacity of 2 but with redundancy and keep the 5th as a spare, or go all out and just do RAID0 across 5 drives. The issue is with the practical ceiling imposed by the SATA3 (6GB) more than anything else I would think. The performance bump going from 1 to 2 drives scales pretty well but then scaling pretty much goes downhill as you add more drives (on SATA3).

Also from my own experiences with RAID arrays in the past, the only "practical" thing they really helped me with, that was noticeable, was speeding up loading screens / zone in times - if that matters to you.

Since I do them for game drives, even if the array takes a dump, I really don't lose anything since they aren't my boot drives - which are 950 / 951 drives.
 
dvsman said:
I've been thinking about this myself. I just got my hands on a handful (5)x 1TB SSDs and have been trying to figure out what to do with them. Between the 3 boxes in my sig and a few laptops sitting around the house I could go all out and put them into one box in a RAID 10 (2x RAID 0) with 4 drives with the capacity of 2 but with redundancy and keep the 5th as a spare, or go all out and just do RAID0 across 5 drives. The issue is with the practical ceiling imposed by the SATA3 (6GB) more than anything else I would think. The performance bump going from 1 to 2 drives scales pretty well but then scaling pretty much goes downhill as you add more drives (on SATA3).

Also from my own experiences with RAID arrays in the past, the only "practical" thing they really helped me with, that was noticeable, was speeding up loading screens / zone in times - if that matters to you.

Since I do them for game drives, even if the array takes a dump, I really don't lose anything since they aren't my boot drives - which are 950 / 951 drives.
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I do not know what your talking about. This is the scaling under IRST that is limited due to the PCH but depends on the rig. SKL has a faster PCH

Scales well until 4th drive due to hitting PCH limits.

What do you mean by SATA3 limits....I do not get what you are saying....

Results: RAID 0 Performance - Six SSD DC S3500 Drives And Intel's RST: Performance In RAID, Tested
 
There's benchmark performance and "felt" performance. Sure the numbers keep going up in diskmark, but if you are just booting, starting up apps, it's really not a perceivable difference to most people. FYI: My point of reference being my 950/951 drives - which according to specs - should be much much faster than a RAID 0 array of SATA3 drives (even 4x 500MB/s drives), but in practice, I really just can't tell the difference. But maybe that's just me

/shrug
 
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If it's just two then I would say RAID0 them. If it's more then 2 or plan on more then 2 (like as budget allows), use Windows "Storage Spaces" and just keep adding the new drives to the pool. That way you can grow your drive capacity, but not have to re-image or re-install every time. The improvement in performance is moot for normal consumer use. If you are in a situation that you think you would benefit from RAID0 SSD, you would probably already know.
 
Since I prefer my systems integrated for all-in-one personal use, I always saw RAID-0 SSD's as superfluous. You won't see any day-to-day gains and you will eat up SATA ports that could have went to more storage and an optical drive.
 
I have 8x SSDs in a RAID 0. It's not worth it, other than bragging rights.

In theory, you are extending the life of the drives by doing a RAID 0, however, you are also increasing your risk of a random total failure as well. But this is less than a mechanical drive anyway.

Personally, I have a bunch of smaller 60 GB SSDs laying around. I RAID 0 them whenever when I set up new test systems.

The primary reason I am not impressed with the performance is that it basically comes on par with an NVMe SSD.
 
drescherjm said:
Not when the transfers are small. You will be doing just the opposite.
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I haven't been able to find a clear answer on transfers smaller than the stripe size. It likely depends on the controller, however most of my research seems to indicate that the controller usually just stores the data directly on the drive if it is smaller than the strip.

Stripe Width and Stripe Size

So if you have a 128k strip and a 4k file, it is only writing it to one disk, which is not going to hurt the SSD any more than using it directly. If you have a 1 MB file, then the wear on the SSD is evenly spread out.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't found any sources to clarify this. I can't imagine a controller writing bogus data file files smaller than the strip simply to write across the stripe.
 
drescherjm said:
Not when the transfers are small. You will be doing just the opposite.
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xantonin said:
I haven't been able to find a clear answer on transfers smaller than the stripe size. It likely depends on the controller, however most of my research seems to indicate that the controller usually just stores the data directly on the drive if it is smaller than the strip.

Stripe Width and Stripe Size

So if you have a 128k strip and a 4k file, it is only writing it to one disk, which is not going to hurt the SSD any more than using it directly. If you have a 1 MB file, then the wear on the SSD is evenly spread out.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't found any sources to clarify this. I can't imagine a controller writing bogus data file files smaller than the strip simply to write across the stripe.
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interesting....keep going :D
 
I slowly added drives to my Raid 0 array (as they went on sale.) Over 3-4 on a MB controller and your not gaining anything though really. I like the peppiness and speed of things compared to one drive if only perceived by me. There is definite benefit in some things like Adobe, encoding, and even some games loads are a lot better (depends on games.) I backup my systems to external HDDs regularly which is the most important part no matter your setup!

I have two systems now running Raid 0 arrays, one with 4x240GB SSDs and the other with 3x64GB SSDs+1TBHDD. I wouldn't change either, and get tons of compliment from friends/people using them about how they feel and use. It's great if you can't afford a larger drive outright and still want the speed they entail...
 
IcarusLSC said:
I slowly added drives to my Raid 0 array (as they went on sale.) Over 3-4 on a MB controller and your not gaining anything though really. I like the peppiness and speed of things compared to one drive if only perceived by me. There is definite benefit in some things like Adobe, encoding, and even some games loads are a lot better (depends on games.) I backup my systems to external HDDs regularly which is the most important part no matter your setup!

I have two systems now running Raid 0 arrays, one with 4x240GB SSDs and the other with 3x64GB SSDs+1TBHDD. I wouldn't change either, and get tons of compliment from friends/people using them about how they feel and use. It's great if you can't afford a larger drive outright and still want the speed they entail...
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and thats exactly what i said...if you are asking than it won't help you :D The people that need RAID 0 already know they need it :D
 
For day to day use, you probably will not notice the benefit of SSD's i nRAID 0. BUT!!! Multiple SSD's in RAID0 can be fun though even if for only bragging rights. :)

A RAM drive is a much better option than SSD in RAID0 for any form of high performance editing. It isn't "too expensive" to get a 120GB RAM drive these days.
 
You'd be better of with either a single larger SSD, or spend the money on a PCIe SSD.

Although you can get 128gb SSD pretty cheap, I'd imagine you'd max out even a SATA 3.2 controller pretty easily. You might have to worry about your RAID controller support TRIM on the SSD's too.

Sorry if any of that is out of date or wrong, it's been a while since I messed around with RAID on non-enterprise level hardware.
 
Trepidati0n said:
For day to day use, you probably will not notice the benefit of SSD's i nRAID 0. BUT!!! Multiple SSD's in RAID0 can be fun though even if for only bragging rights. :)

A RAM drive is a much better option than SSD in RAID0 for any form of high performance editing. It isn't "too expensive" to get a 120GB RAM drive these days.
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if they offered RAM drives that ram through PCIe 16x I would totally buy a card and throw 128-256GB of RAM into it but alas they haven't made PCIe RAM disk is ages and those old ones were ghetto and jerry rigged to hell.

You can't run an OS drive off system memory because if you could I would lol.
 
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