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Raid 0 or SSD?

I

intrusionzero

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 19, 2006
Messages
93
So right now my pc is most lacking in the hard drive read/write area. Im looking into what will be the best way to go, and what i've come up with is either buying a solid state drive or setting up my two 400gb hard drives into a raid 0.

Will a raid 0 be as effective as a solid state drive?

which would be the best way to go for a gaming rig?
 
I tried RAID 0 of hdd's and was not impressed at all. A single SSD kicks its ass all day long.
 
iba I tried RAID 0 of hdd's and was not impressed at all.
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It used to be very impressive when drives had a STR of 25MB/s to 35MB/s. And if you created a raid 0 of 3 to 6 of them you would break the 100MB/s barrier assuming your raid card was a PCI-X card..
 
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i use an ssd for my OS but i have a quad 640gb raid 0 array i install all my games and use hor hd video capture, the raid array has 400mb/s read/writes but the access times are meh compared to an SSD, the obvious choice is to get an SSD atleast for the OS

but for $200-240 you can get a 2.8TB raid array with 400mb/s reads/writes so assumming access time isnt important for your need raid HDD offer high sequential speeds for a fraction of th eprice/capacity of SSD's
 
intrusionzero said:
how much of a difference will there be?
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Tons!

Blinding Rip your Eyeballs out Fast! LOL!

Sorry but that question has been asked at least 9 zillion times and the answer is always the same.........
"How much difference" is a relative term that only you would know. :)

Let me put it this way....it's by far the best single upgrade you can easily do. :)
 
Three gives really nice boost over single or two disks and sequential read/write speeds can be really impressive. So if you are working with large files (like video editing), RAID0 HDD's are good option. Be sure that you make proper backups. One of my F3's just started to fail and that destroyed my whole array (I had very recent image backup, so I didn't loose much stuff). The best option in my opinion is to use SSD for OS and some IOPS heavy applications, games are hardly those, though.
 
Yeah RAID is awesome for data handling. Use a dedicated SSD for the OS/Apps.
 
SSD is the single greatest leap forward in performance that I can recall of in the past 20 years. I've never personally experienced any other new tech that was so utterly superior to it's predecessor.

No question about it; go SSD
 
intrusionzero said:
how much of a difference will there be?
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it's almost as, having one hdd equal to 1 horse, having one ssd equal to the space shuttle. get the ssd no question about it. look for one with sata3 with 500mb/s read/write.
 
insert said:
it's almost as, having one hdd equal to 1 horse, having one ssd equal to the space shuttle. get the ssd no question about it. look for one with sata3 with 500mb/s read/write.
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Sooo... Sandforce?

Total SSDphobe chiming in here... Is the $500 worth the extra pain of it slowing down due to normal use/having to backup-wipe once a week/getting a faulty drive/massive speed reduction when over 50% full/price per GB/wiping for firmware updates/inability to raid without screwing something up?

Edit: forgot to add "wiping for firmware updates".
 
xSystemFailurex said:
Sooo... Sandforce?

Total SSDphobe chiming in here... Is the $500 worth the extra pain of it slowing down due to normal use/having to backup-wipe once a week/getting a faulty drive/massive speed reduction when over 50% full/price per GB/wiping for firmware updates/inability to raid without screwing something up?

Edit: forgot to add "wiping for firmware updates".
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nearly everything you've said here is an outdated myth.

first, normal use does not, and will not, ever, slow an ssd down to the point that you would have been better off with a hard drive.

next, you will not have to "backup/wipe" once a week. you will never have to do that.

getting a faulty drive can happen with hard drives just as easily.

the "massive speed reduction" is the same at 25% as 50%. there's a 10% difference in speed between 25% and 75% even, it's basically nothing, and it only mainly affects writes.

every firmware update I've done for an ssd was non destructive of data. you can raid ssds just like you raid hard drives and be fine, there's nothing special to it.

as for the sandforce question, you don't need sandforce to get 500mb/s. m4s on the latest firmware are capable of 500mb/s read now.
 
gjs278 said:
nearly everything you've said here is an outdated myth.

first, normal use does not, and will not, ever, slow an ssd down to the point that you would have been better off with a hard drive.

next, you will not have to "backup/wipe" once a week. you will never have to do that.

getting a faulty drive can happen with hard drives just as easily.

the "massive speed reduction" is the same at 25% as 50%. there's a 10% difference in speed between 25% and 75% even, it's basically nothing, and it only mainly affects writes.

every firmware update I've done for an ssd was non destructive of data. you can raid ssds just like you raid hard drives and be fine, there's nothing special to it.

as for the sandforce question, you don't need sandforce to get 500mb/s. m4s on the latest firmware are capable of 500mb/s read now.
Click to expand...

- Never said they would degrade to that point, it's just that at that price / performance needs to be justified.

- I have heard of ppl with certain SSDs of certain brands *cough OCZ cough* who are ok doing this. On their official forums no less.

- Read newegg reviews for failed SSDs and compare customer DISsatisfaction to that of hard drive users. SSDs failure rate is exponentially higher, no contest. I don't like to have my time wasted.

- Again, price/performance justification.

- From what I've read on official fourms, lucky you. From what else I've read on official forums, TRIM isn't supported on RAID 0 in Win7 on most if not all SSDs I've researched.

- m4s can now exceed 500mbs thanks to a firmware update that came out how many months after release? Their write speeds are the same if not worse (post-0009 update), and are not comparable to a sandforce SSD in the first place.

Seems to me that with SSDs you can either break the bank on a slower reliable drive or a faster unreliable drive. Call me when you can have both.
 
xSystemFailurex said:
Seems to me that with SSDs you can either break the bank on a slower reliable drive or a faster unreliable drive. Call me when you can have both.
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You can't judge a grilled juicy steak if you've never tasted one.

Intel drives are not slow by a longshot and will eat alive any Hard drive you have ever owned. You want a drive that will take you on a super joyride coupled with the best reliability ratio. Well there you go. No more speculation until you try it. End of story.
 
rive22 said:
You can't judge a grilled juicy steak if you've never tasted one.

Intel drives are not slow by a longshot and will eat alive any Hard drive you have ever owned. You want a drive that will take you on a super joyride coupled with the best reliability ratio. Well there you go. No more speculation until you try it. End of story.
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Except that their performance numbers are not on par with other SSDs with similar prices. I'm not concerned about how they stack up against an HD's performance; that war was won the day the first SSD dropped.

The dillemma is sports car X costs just as much as Y but is slower and uglier yet more reliable. At the end of the day it's still a sports car, so what is the point of having an ugly slow (when compared to other sports cars) one? On the other side of the coin, I'm not the type that has the time or patience to do the maintenace on the fast attractive unreliable sports car, and it's my opinion that SSDs have been out too long and still cost way too much to have so many problems, yet people eat them up simply because it makes their apps insta-load. Enthusiasts have insisted since day 1 that people need to buy up all the SSDs so that prices can go down and they can become mainstream. That's not happening at all. I see them ending up like CDs. 15 years on they're still charging the same price simply because they know for a fact people will pay said price, not because they're actually that magical and advanced.
 
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Except that their performance numbers are not on par with other SSDs with similar prices.
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They are when you consider all Sandforce released specs are 2 to 3 times what you will realistically see in the real world.
 
drescherjm said:
They are when you consider all Sandforce released specs are 2 to 3 times what you will realistically see in the real world.
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Yet another reason to doubt SSDs ;).

I have one camp telling me "SSDs are amazing, get one with 500 read 500 write!", and another saying "Those guys are liars, pay up and settle for the slower reliable stuff cuz it's still faster than HDs and that's all that matters!".
 
A SSD is still 50 times (or more) faster at reading and writing small files (which is usually the most frequent operation for a desktop system) than any hard drive or even raid array. If one was to care about STR you can get 1GB/s STR from a raid6 array of 5400 RPM hard drives. However in most cases STR is not the determining factor of performance. How often do you read 1GB files in 1 chunk to memory? Remember that even for a normal 2011 hard drive it would take around 8 seconds to read the entire 1GB file if it was sequential.
 
drescherjm said:
A SSD is still 50 times (or more) faster at reading and writing small files (which is usually the most frequent operation for a desktop system) than any hard drive or even raid array. If one was to care about STR you can get 1GB/s STR from a raid6 array of 5400 RPM hard drives. However in most cases STR is not the determining factor of performance. How often do you read 1GB files in 1 chunk to memory? Remember that even for a normal 2011 hard drive it would take around 8 seconds to read the entire 1GB file if it was sequential.
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Again, I'm not comparing SSDs to HDDs. At this point I'm comparing reliable slow SSDs to "fast" unreliable ones and commenting on how they've been out too long and are too small capacity to be so expensive.
 
The price of SSDs is extremely dependent on the price of NAND. NAND is expensive to make and takes a lot of time and electricity. Significantly more so than anything in a mechanical drive. Increasing the demand will not make it 1/10 the price. And since they are already approaching limitations of the process shrinking the cells will also not make the price go down to 1/10 of what it is now. I do not see silicon based NAND SSDs ever totally replacing hard drives.
 
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yeah last generation ssds are also very fast compared to hdds. i was just trying to tell you about the best there is now.
 
xSystemFailurex said:
At the end of the day it's still a sports car, so what is the point of having an ugly slow (when compared to other sports cars) one?
Click to expand...
That is our point. You're assuming the Intel is slow based on as previously mentioned fluffed up benchmarks that are produced from the Sandforce drives. When you are driving a Ford Fiesta and you go into the Realm of Super Cars and are comparing say a Bugatti Veyron vs CCXR vs Saleen S7. They each have their own strengths over each other, but at the end of the day each one is a supercar and will own the Ford Feista. To say that one Supercar is greatly inferior to the other depends on ones needs. But when owning a Ford Fiesta ANY supercar is a huge upgrade.

I recommend you consider Crucial M4 drives.
 
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Other than OCZ SSDs, what SSDs are you referring to when you say fast unreliable? What are you referring to when you say slow reliable? What are you using to base your reliability judgements? Only Newegg reviews?

Return rates for a french retailer
http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/29329-ssd-failure-rates-compared-to-hard-drives/

The reported Intel return rates match up will with Intel's own reported failure rates:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4244/intel-ssd-320-review

At the very least, saying SSDs have an exponentially higher failure rate then HDDs is incorrect.
 
xSystemFailurex said:
- Never said they would degrade to that point, it's just that at that price / performance needs to be justified.

- I have heard of ppl with certain SSDs of certain brands *cough OCZ cough* who are ok doing this. On their official forums no less.

- Read newegg reviews for failed SSDs and compare customer DISsatisfaction to that of hard drive users. SSDs failure rate is exponentially higher, no contest. I don't like to have my time wasted.

- Again, price/performance justification.

- From what I've read on official fourms, lucky you. From what else I've read on official forums, TRIM isn't supported on RAID 0 in Win7 on most if not all SSDs I've researched.

- m4s can now exceed 500mbs thanks to a firmware update that came out how many months after release? Their write speeds are the same if not worse (post-0009 update), and are not comparable to a sandforce SSD in the first place.

Seems to me that with SSDs you can either break the bank on a slower reliable drive or a faster unreliable drive. Call me when you can have both.
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- It is justified, it never gets slow at all

- You dont have to do it. ever.

- Please "save" yourself all of that time and load off of your shitty hard drive because you think ssds are unreliable

- You don't need trim on ssds in raid0. they are over-provisioned. there is garbage collection. the speed difference between 25% full and 75% full is 10% in the hardest of benchmarks. again, you would know this is you even bothered to find out what trim does. trim does nothing more than free up space that has already been used and then deleted. if you use the same amount of data at all times, it doesn't matter if you have trim. if you fill up your drives even 25%, the performance will be the same as a drive that is 25% full with trim. on top of that, you write to each drive half the amount of times in raid0, putting less stress and writes on the drives overall.

- there are no sata ssds that can write 500mb/s on random data, it can only speed up the process when working with compressed data. there does not exist the 500mb/s writing random data sata drive.

if you want a reliable fast drive, get the m4. it can read just as fast as as a sandforce sequentially, and they've sold for as low as $150 for the 120gb version. for $184, you can get something like a force gt that can do the 500mb/s write on compressed data, but will only have that small advantage.

so what is the problem now? if you want a fast reliable drive, get the m4. if you want to pay a bit more, you can buy a sandforce drive that will add features like data compression for writes which I wouldn't justify with the extra money.
 
gjs278 said:
- It is justified, it never gets slow at all

- You dont have to do it. ever.

- Please "save" yourself all of that time and load off of your shitty hard drive because you think ssds are unreliable

- You don't need trim on ssds in raid0. they are over-provisioned. there is garbage collection. the speed difference between 25% full and 75% full is 10% in the hardest of benchmarks. again, you would know this is you even bothered to find out what trim does. trim does nothing more than free up space that has already been used and then deleted. if you use the same amount of data at all times, it doesn't matter if you have trim. if you fill up your drives even 25%, the performance will be the same as a drive that is 25% full with trim. on top of that, you write to each drive half the amount of times in raid0, putting less stress and writes on the drives overall.

- there are no sata ssds that can write 500mb/s on random data, it can only speed up the process when working with compressed data. there does not exist the 500mb/s writing random data sata drive.

if you want a reliable fast drive, get the m4. it can read just as fast as as a sandforce sequentially, and they've sold for as low as $150 for the 120gb version. for $184, you can get something like a force gt that can do the 500mb/s write on compressed data, but will only have that small advantage.

so what is the problem now? if you want a fast reliable drive, get the m4. if you want to pay a bit more, you can buy a sandforce drive that will add features like data compression for writes which I wouldn't justify with the extra money.
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No need to get angry. I'm an admitted SSDphobe as I stated earlier in this thread. The homework I've done on trim and garbage collection must be pretty outdated by what you're telling me here.

Am I to believe that I can get 2 modern SATA 6 SSDs from any company, raid them together in windows 7 and have no problems or noticeable performance degradation whatsoever, ever?
 
xSystemFailurex said:
Am I to believe that I can get 2 modern SATA 6 SSDs from any company, raid them together in windows 7 and have no problems or noticeable performance degradation whatsoever, ever?
Click to expand...

yes. degradation isn't as major as people play it out to be. there was a test by tweaktown that showed a drive features the largest degrade from 0% full to 25%, and from there, 50% full and 75% full are hardly noticeable, within a 10% performance range. the degrade in the drive is mainly the write speed, the read speed will stay steady.

this means that even if you were using the drive with trim, and you fill it at least 25%, you will have the same level of degrade as raided drives that are each 50% full, but the degrade will be much less on the raid array because you have the power of both drives to pull from AND the degrade is mainly on write speeds.
 
gjs278 said:
yes. degradation isn't as major as people play it out to be. there was a test by tweaktown that showed a drive features the largest degrade from 0% full to 25%, and from there, 50% full and 75% full are hardly noticeable, within a 10% performance range. the degrade in the drive is mainly the write speed, the read speed will stay steady.

this means that even if you were using the drive with trim, and you fill it at least 25%, you will have the same level of degrade as raided drives that are each 50% full, but the degrade will be much less on the raid array because you have the power of both drives to pull from AND the degrade is mainly on write speeds.
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Thank you for this. Seriously looking into some Crucial M4s.
 
xSystemFailurex said:
Thank you for this. Seriously looking into some Crucial M4s.
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64gb m4s are like $90 right now. just don't forget to upgrade the firmware.

two of them will max out the sequential read on your ich10r mobo controller, just something to keep in mind. there's not much to gain beyond two ssds raided either way unless you're doing the db work of the century so it should be fine.
 
raid0 on mechanical drives are useless unless you really need shitloads of storage you don't care about.

raid0 on ssd is almost always overkill for things like OS++, if coming from mechanical drives, a single ssd will feel like a whole new world.
 
gjs278 said:
64gb m4s are like $90 right now. just don't forget to upgrade the firmware.

two of them will max out the sequential read on your ich10r mobo controller, just something to keep in mind. there's not much to gain beyond two ssds raided either way unless you're doing the db work of the century so it should be fine.
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There is issues with the new firmware?
 
Stick with the Crucial M4 or an Intel drive. Vertex 2 drives and Vertex 3 128GB (and smaller) drives lose compressible write performance over time and the only way to recover is a secure erase. Fortunately read speed stays the same, but having V2 compressible write speed cut in half is unacceptable. The V3 is better in this regard compared to the V2 as it doesn't lose as much performance and the V3 256GB drives seem immune to abuse.

Still, I wouldn't trust those fuckers.
 
xSystemFailurex said:
Again, I'm not comparing SSDs to HDDs. At this point I'm comparing reliable slow SSDs to "fast" unreliable ones and commenting on how they've been out too long and are too small capacity to be so expensive.
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USB sticks have been out far longer and the high capacity ones are still expensive. They're using the same NAND as SSDs. Or rather, it's the opposite, and in fact the first SSDs were just compact flash cards.

Also, "high capacity" is a moving target, year after year we want more.
 
gjs278 said:
64gb m4s are like $90 right now. just don't forget to upgrade the firmware.

two of them will max out the sequential read on your ich10r mobo controller, just something to keep in mind. there's not much to gain beyond two ssds raided either way unless you're doing the db work of the century so it should be fine.
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Yeah, I'll be picking up a SATA 6 board here sometime in the next month or so. I just want the space without shelling out for a single 256.
 
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