Cheap SSD RAID? Large HD Question.

J

Jutny

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Sep 11, 2000
Messages
6,013
I'm an old school [H]'er, but i've been out of it for a while. currently doing a mobo/cpu/ram/psu/case upgrade on my old 3800x2 system to an e8400, p45-ud3p, 8gb, hx850, lili x1000

With all this talk of the Kingston 40gb coming in at $86 tomorrow @ newegg, it makes me wonder if I should snag two of them and replace my 36gb raptor as a primary (OS, newest game) drive. (especially because the Lian Li x1000 that's coming has 2 nifty SSD mounts:D)

Is it worth it? Is it worth it for the system i'm upgrading to?

I've got a 36gb Raptor, and some generic 500gb 7200rpm WD drive in the computer for storage. I feel I should snag at least a 1Tb drive to replace that as well. I see the WD black's and greens being talked about. I would love to save some power as i spent the extra money on an efficient PSU, but am i going to sacrifice performance? Bear in mind if i DO go with the 80gb SSD raid, that I'll have to install some games on the big storage drive, so I don't want it to be a dog. So also, which 1+tb HD would you recommend in that case.

:confused: help a brother out.
 
Any modern HDD will blow that 36GB Raptor out of the water, As far as SSD's go, if your don't mind the risks, RAID0 will be fine, just only give you 80GB of space which is still kinda restrictive.

My 80GB intel ssd feels small to me lol
 
what are the risks associated with the RAID0 on SSD's? Moreso/different than on conventional HDD's?

I want to retain a seperation between drives, so I can easily back up to a big drive and just reformat/install on the smaller "drive" (raid, ssd, raptor... whatever).

also, i'm used to having a very small primary drive, as it is, the 80gb raid would be twice what i'm running as an OS/main drive right now.
 
k1pp3r said:
Well if your going to keep them seperate, there is no risk
Click to expand...

meaning i want to have two separate storage volumes, not keep the ssd's separate. It would be 2 ssd's in a raid 0 AND a large conventional drive.
 
More devices, more chances of failure somewhere down the line. It is fine though with the two ssd in raid 0 and the large conventional storage; many people are already doing this.
 
Okay, I might just skip it (SSD RAID) for now and get a 1tb WD black.

so for a OS drive, no contest, the WD Black will be faster then my 36gb Raptor? I just want to make sure.


HMMMMM maybe two 500/750gb WD blacks in Raid 0? viable?
 
Jutny said:
Okay, I might just skip it (SSD RAID) for now and get a 1tb WD black.

so for a OS drive, no contest, the WD Black will be faster then my 36gb Raptor? I just want to make sure.


HMMMMM maybe two 500/750gb WD blacks in Raid 0? viable?
Click to expand...

WB 6400AALS drive will murder the 36GB Raptor, or you can buy my old 36 GB Raptor off me and RAID 0 lol
 
ordered 2 750gb blacks from newegg for 79 each, So i'll raid them and make my 500gb just a swap shit around/backup drive.

sweet. Can't wait for a real system again.

SSD's can wait.

2 x ($79.99) HD 750|WD 7K 32M SATA2 WD7501AALS - OEM
$159.98
Click to expand...
 
k1pp3r said:
Any modern HDD will blow that 36GB Raptor out of the water, As far as SSD's go, if your don't mind the risks, RAID0 will be fine, just only give you 80GB of space which is still kinda restrictive.

My 80GB intel ssd feels small to me lol
Click to expand...

What exactly are the risks?
 
Oh alright thats not bad. I think im going to pick up two of these drives tomorrow then if I can.
 
Just for reference

2 WD 6400AALS in RAID0
OSDrive.jpg


Single intel x-25 M
DiskSSD.png


*Dunno whats up with 0.0 MS response time on the SSD lol its normaly around 0.1 ms
 
I would not trust this anyway because according to the results SSD increase the CPU processing power by 1% =)
 
sweet, i can live with a that difference in performance. especially considering 1.5Tb @$175 vs 0.08Tb @$250
 
Last edited:
Jutny said:
sweet, i can live with a that difference in performance. especially considering 1.5Tb @$175 vs 0.08Gb @$250
Click to expand...

Access & seek time are pretty damn important. Mechanical hard drives have to spin platters, multipule platters, heads, etc... SSD are just flash chips. While transfer and burst rates look great, how much of that is important to you in real life interest? Do you think access times are more important than transfer rates in games? Are you spending a lot of time copying hard drives?
 
FrostBite said:
Access & seek time are pretty damn important. Mechanical hard drives have to spin platters, multipule platters, heads, etc... SSD are just flash chips. While transfer and burst rates look great, how much of that is important to you in real life interest? Do you think access times are more important than transfer rates in games? Are you spending a lot of time copying hard drives?
Click to expand...

trust me, I understand. However my budget does not allow for the SSD's at the moment :(. I was also running out of storage space, so this kind of bridges the gap. Then, when the ssd's become affordable, I can turn the array into separate disks for storage and run the ssd as a primary.

sucks to not be able to do it right, but I will, in due time.
 
Jutny said:
trust me, I understand. However my budget does not allow for the SSD's at the moment :(. I was also running out of storage space, so this kind of bridges the gap. Then, when the ssd's become affordable, I can turn the array into separate disks for storage and run the ssd as a primary.

sucks to not be able to do it right, but I will, in due time.
Click to expand...

Well, do you have $105 and and time to wait for a $20 rebate? If so, jump on the SSD deal tomorrow, and keep your raptor and 500 gig hard drives as storage. Going from a mechnical HD to even this SSD will be a huge leap in performance. By the time you get more money, SSD and mechanical hard drives will go down in price so why get a 1TB WD Black for more than $85 when next year you might get a 2TB WD Black for the same price as the 1TB now? Especially if the WD Black will be no where near the performance gain compared to a SSD.

As for low on space since you mentioned it, if your primary focus is gaming, it might be well worth the effort to get a portable hard drive on the cheap or burn stuff to CD's. The portable hard drive is a pretty good option since it will work with any system in the future too.
 
it doesnt seem worth it for a 40gb ssd, unless i get 2 and raid them.

I feel like the 2 blacks in raid0 will be so much faster then what I currently have, that i'll be fine for a while.

The machine is used for gaming, media center, general nonsense... all things really.
 
2 x 1Tb WD Black sounds like the way to go considering your budget. Its fast and big. You can use your 500Gb drive to back up your data to help offset the risk of the RAID 0.

In the future when SSD prices drop a little get an 80-120Gb drive for your OS and you should be good to go.

I just upgraded my drives and I still had my old 74Gb Raptor in there which is faster than your 36Gb Raptor.
I actually planned on putting the 2 x 640Gb Blacks in RAID 1, but I figured I could just run an auto back up on my important stuff.

So here's a little comparison of a good SSD (intel X25-M) vs a good HD (640Gb Black) vs an old 74Gb Raptor:
http://www.crowdcontrolusa.com/overclock/80gb-ssd.gif

A SSD is like 30x faster in small (4k) random reads/writes, which is what A LOT of pagefile, caching & other read/writes are. The response time is over 80x faster (0.1ms vs about 9ms)

When I upgraded from using the 74Gb Raptor as my OS drive to the 640Gb Black a few months back I noticed a marked speed increase. Then when I just upgraded a few weeks ago to the 80Gb SSD I felt another nice increase.
 
So is it worth it to have an SSD for OS ONLY?

because a 40gb isnt going to go much farther. On top of that, is the "slow" kingston cheep SSD going to be better then the raid0 with blacks.

Does Raid0 negatively effect access times?

Does gaming (i guess FPS is what matters here?) heavily rely on access times? (I wouldn't think so, especially with 8gb of RAM)

What relies most on access times in general computer usage?
 
Threads got me thinking...

Would there be any benefit to using x2 cheap SSD's in Raid 0, rather then using 1 great SSD for your OS drive?
 
TRIM

Personally, I'm getting 2x Kingston and RAID 0 them. Later, when SSD prices are finally good, I'll split them up and make a car computer or something. An SSD now is better than no SSD now.
 
meh they're sold out anyway. Just woke up "early" to try to snag one but no go.
 
Cyant said:
-1% CPU Usage mean it increase available CPU power by 1%

So no I don't mean -1% :p

(of course I know it's not true but it would be nice tho eheh)
Click to expand...

Oh, i read you wrong lol. Yes SSD's make your CPU better!!!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top