Raid 0 4x640 WD aaks or a SSD?

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Jun 4, 2008
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I already have 2 640's in raid 0 short stroked. Wondering if it would be better to add 2 more or go with a SSD. Any thoughts? Thanks
 
Do you need the 1280+ GB of space? Thats gonna be a pretty expensive SSD(s).
what is this drive array used for?
 
The SSD will be faster in random reads/writes than the 640s, even if the sequential is not. I'd much rather have an SSD than 4 drives in a RAID 0 config (from a reliability standpoint if nothing else).
 
Hard drive RAID 0 provides more GB for each dollar spent.
A single (quality) SSD is going to be more reliable (new SSDs have fairly low failure rates and you have 4x the failure rate with four drives), use less power, create less heat, take up less space, not cause vibration, be more durable, and provide way more small file size performance (although probably only 1/2 to 2/3 of those four drives in RAID 0 from a large sequential read perspective).
 
It's just for gamming.. I only use part of it. Like I said the raid 0 I have now is short stroked. I only use about 245 gigs of the 2 drives I have now. Dont care about power or failure rate :) just speed. All my stuff is backed up on my WHS.
 
4 spinning disks in RAID-0? I don't think the logarithmic performance gains are worth the drawbacks.

I think you'd find much more benefit, if you haven't already, from getting more RAM. If it's load times you're worried about, more RAM means more content is more readily available to the processor, easing up future I/O (slow!) requests.
 
It's just for gamming.. I only use part of it. Like I said the raid 0 I have now is short stroked. I only use about 245 gigs of the 2 drives I have now. Dont care about power or failure rate :) just speed. All my stuff is backed up on my WHS.

Just get a SSD if you have the money. Even though 4 drives in RAID 0 is speedy, a single SSD will blow it away, no matter what HDDs are used. Get it and just use the other HDDs as storage.
 
I'd recommend a single good SSD over 4x raid 0 HDD's for gaming. I think the loading of tons of small files will be faster.

Best case scenario: 2x raid 0 with two good SSD's. It would run you less than $200 for example for about 0.5 GB/s of random read speed, with about 128 GB of space. (In this example, which is something I'm planning shortly, two 64GB OCZ Vertex 2's)
 
Granted the access time is faster on the ssd. My raid 0 short stroked has the same transfer speeds and more space. As far as failing I have been running raid 0 since the 36gig raptors came out and have yet to have any issue. I know i know its going to happen. But its a gamming rig only. I reinstall windows every 2-3 months. All the important stuff is on the sever and online backup.
 
I doubt the RAID0 array can even come close to the transfer speeds of a decent SSD. I've had 4 36GB raptors in RAID0 and it couldn't even begin to touch the speed of my OCZ SSD, and this was on a much faster desktop system compared to my netbook, both access and transfer speeds.

If you need speed, SSD. If you need storage, HDD.

If you aren't having any problems though, then just stay where you are, but upgrading to more HDDs of that size is a waste of money, imo.
 
My raid setup is short stroked, meaning I only use the fastest pard of my hard drives. It cuts my 2x640s down to 235gigs. Running it this way gives me 220-245 transfer rates right there with an ssd. If you have seen what short stroked drives can do you might want to check it out.
 
Is that 235 gigs total, or 235 gigs per drive? Seems mighty wasteful to be using only 20% of the drive.
 
When I moved to a SSD (single at that time) I had been using a RAID 5 8x 15K RPM 2.5" SAS drives on an Adaptec 5805 w/ a BBU. I have since sold much of my 15K RPM SAS stuff and purchased only SSDs.
 
You can use the rest of the drive so you dont waist it. Things stored in the second partion will just be slower to bring up. What your doing is using the outside of the drive only for the primary partion. That way all the data in that part stays on the outside of the plater the fastest part of the drive.
 
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