Disk setup for new Sandy Bridge build

[Ogder]

Ok, so I've finally decided to break down and put together a new LGA 1155 system for gaming, and the only thing I'm having trouble settling on is the layout of my storage system.

Here is the motherboard I'm going after: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131730

My main concern is the speed difference between the Intel and Marvell SATA III ports. I was originally planning on avoiding the Marvell ports altogether and getting a 64Gb Crucial m4 and a 128Gb m4 for each Intel slot. The 64Gb holding my OS and the 128Gb for online/frequently played games. This setup would give me TRIM on both drives and utilize the higher speed Intel ports.

Recently I've also been considering an alternative setup: 2 x 128Gb m4's in RAID 0 on the Intel ports with a 64gb m4 as an OS drive on a Marvell port, or perhaps even forgo the 64Gb drive completely and have the OS on the RAID. Which do you think is more important, the speed of the RAID 0 or sacrificing the speed for TRIM on the Marvell? Am I blowing the difference between the Intel and Marvell controllers out of proportions? According to [H]'s own benches the Marvell controller is about 60% of the speed (in reads) but will I even notice this in reality? I'm fairly confident in the garbage collecting abilities of the m4's but do you think TRIM is a necessity for an OS drive?

I also have some considerations to make regarding the four SATA II ports. Right now I'm looking at getting 3 of these drives: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136697

I want to put three of those into a RAID 0 and use my current 40Gb Vertex 2 as a cache using the new handy dandy Intel SRT. Do you think that's worth pursuing? Should I ditch the SRT crap altogether and just go with four HDD's? I just need a terabyte or two worth of storage for random stuff (some games, movies, music, etc.) but I've got RAID capabilities on those four ports so I want to take advantage of that. All in all, I don't deal with any data that I'm not terrified of losing so the risks of RAID 0 aren't that big of a deal to me.

Now that I've got all of this typed out, it seems like a lot... hehe especially for my first post. Thanks for reading!

 

[Forceman]

I'd ditch the SRT idea - RAIDed spinning drives should be plenty fast enough since you'll be using the SSDs for the stuff you access the most. I wouldn't worry about running the SSDs in RAID - they are plenty fast enough by themselves, and TRIM is nice to have. If you do decide to go with 2 x 128s put the OS on there as well and scrap the smaller M4. So either 2 x 128 in RAID on Intel 6GB with 3 x HDD in RAID on the Intel 3GB, or the same config but without the SSD RAID.

Edit: If you are just using the HDDs for storage, save a bunch of money and hassle and just get a single 2TB drive. Heck, for that matter, just get a single 256GB M4 and a 2TB HDD and call it a day.

 

[Ogder]

I was going to avoid the 256Gb m4's because all of the benches I have seen show them to be slower than the 128's. Also, I wanted to avoid the single large drive. I've got a 1TB that I use for storage right now and I feel like it is too slow to spin up and get going. Also, I plan on putting large single player games (think Fallout + mods) on the HDD array to save space on my SSD's and I figured RAID 0 would help with my load times.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[drescherjm]

I would actually use the SRT and skip the raided spinners. Although I do not have experience with the SSD cache in Intels motherboards this feature works pretty well in software solutions like flashcache in linux or zfs.