Quick SSD question

[Undercover_Man]

Have Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD
Need more GB's
Is it better to replace with a bigger SSD or is there any performance hit if I add an SSD?
If I add, must it be same make/model or will any SSD be fine?

For example, there's a Samsung 850 EVO in a Black Friday ad from Dell.com that I'm interested in. There will most likely be more SSD's pop up too.

 

[Xinmosni]

Adding additional drives won't slow down your initial SSD, no matter if you use RAID 0 or just allocate it separately.

It also won't matter much it you mix and match, but I prefer to stay with same models for OCD's sake...

If you don't already have a good storage setup, you're much better off buying two or more regular hard drives. Going without some sort of backup solution for your main drive will suck hard if things go south (and unless you have the budget, doing an all SSD build is more expensive than most people would like).

 

[Undercover_Man]

Not too knowledgeable with raid levels, but for SSD's, can I do a couple+ SSD's to expand and then get a massive HDD to mirror it in case an SSD fails?
Can that be a thing? Must the backup HDD be as fast as the SSD or will it slow the whole thing down since SSD's are obviously faster than an HDD?
Is there a good workaround?
I just want to add SSD's as I need them and maybe combine them to a bigger one when I get too many, but at the same time provide backup to my files.

 

[drescherjm]

Not too knowledgeable with raid levels, but for SSD's, can I do a couple+ SSD's to expand and then get a massive HDD to mirror it in case an SSD fails?

The mirror would most likely be as fast as the slowest device (meaning it will operate like a hard drive array).

Is there a good workaround?

Do a proper backups instead. Mirroring is not a backup solution.

I just want to add SSD's as I need them

Many fake raid implementations will not allow expansion of raid0 volumes like that.


http://superuser.com/questions/519157/adding-a-drive-to-a-hardware-raid-0-array

 

[bigdogchris]

I think it would be better, and much cheaper, to buy a large hard drive and move over data that doesn't need SSD performance (like pictures, movies, etc), and just leave the OS and applications on the SSD.

 

[Undercover_Man]

Ok, how about this. Is there a program where I can simply plug in an external hard drive and it will auto-sync select folders that I want to backup? Maybe plug it in before I go to sleep and wake up to everything backed up in the morning.

Many fake raid implementations will not allow expansion of raid0 volumes like that.

What do you mean? I can't add an SSD to my PC and give myself more GB's? Do I have to start everything over?

 

[drescherjm]

Adding a drive to a raid0 array means the entire raid0 array needs to be rearranged / rewritten since raid0 stripes blocks across all members of the array. This also means all drives need to be the same size (or if they are larger the extra space on the larger drive is wasted).

Also I am pretty sure you can't expand from a single disk to a multi drive raid0 directly.

 

[drescherjm]

With that said your controller may support a spanning mode instead of raid.

 

[drescherjm]

Do I have to start everything over?

One option is to restore from backup. If your raid will not allow expansion. With 1 drive you don't have raid0 so you most likely will have to do that to go to 2 drives in raid0 anyways.

Or you could just use individual drives and avoid the situation completely.

 

[rive22]

You are a candidate for Stablebit Drivepool. You can pool all your drives into a single visible volume and not use raid, and you can add new ones at any time while continuously increasing the size. Whether you decide to keep adding SSDs or HDDs for the larger files, etc. The drives can all be different, that is fine.

If you want to backup all your stuff painlessly use a drive cloner like clonezilla, activediskimage, acronis, etc. If you want to backup individual folders or a batch of many folders, use something like FreeFileSync. If you are not sure that you have 100% of everything you want backed up, I recommend cloning the entire drive.

If you go the above route, the best bet is usually using SSDs for OS, Apps, Games, scratch disk, system files, etc. Then use HDD's in your drivepool for bulk media storage, and use the SSD cache plugin to add a different SSD on top of the drivepool to cache files.