Keep my SSDs in RAID0 or not?

[Ravynmagi]

I have my two 120GB OCZ Vertex drives in a RAID0. It gets about 500MB/s peak read performance on my ICH10R together and around 250MB/s individually.

I'd like TRIM support (which isn't available using RAID), though not a big deal yet as I don't really see much of a slow down with all the extra room I leave open on the drives.

Also I'd like to put some games and virtual machines on the second SSD and be able to take them with me when I travel (pop-it out of my desktop's Patriot Convoy and into an eSATA enclosure for my laptop).

Right now my OS, apps, and games are on the SSD RAID0. Would I see any noticeable negative performance if I split the drives up, with my OS and apps on one and the games/vms on the other?

And I wouldn't mind speeding up my boot times by being able to disable that RAID controller if possible. Though that isn't a real concern.

 

[Old Hippie]

You already know that the specs will be halved if you split the drives.

Would I see any noticeable negative performance if I split the drives up

Noticeable is subjective and everyone's different.

Of course there will be a difference and the only thing I can offer is my own personal experience with my Intel drives.

I've been playing with these things for @ 1.5 yrs in RAID0 and as singles and even though there's a difference I don't believe it's dramatic enough for you to want the RAID back.

There's still enough performance because many of the read/write speeds that are excessive in RAID0 can still carry a single drive into the "screaming" zone.

I've read many that have come to the same conclusion as I have and feel you will probably be satisfied with the performance of your desired configuration.

 

[omniscence]

I think boot time scales best with access time and not transfer rate. Of course access time will not significantly improve with RAID0.