Raid current Blacks or SSD advice needed

[XdVeLoPeX]

I have two 1TB Western Digital Black WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0 drives both running firmware 05.01D05 SATA/6.0 on the native Intel 6gb ports on my mobo in sig wanted to know if i was to raid these two drives would I get similar if not better performance then an SSD?

I heard something about these drives not having TLER enabled or something like that which caused problems with them dropping from the array but have seen many people run them in raid believe a member on here that ive played BF3 with has them raided will it work? better or worse? i cant spend too much and i need more then 80gb drive..

 

[gjs278]

you would not get better performance than an ssd

 

[XdVeLoPeX]

which one are you reffering to so i can compare benchmarks

 

[gjs278]

basically any last gen ssd will beat your blacks.

if you need a reference, look at the benchmarks for intel 510, crucial m4, and the patriot wildfire.

all of them will have superior performance compared to two black drives.

 

[XdVeLoPeX]

so without raid mode runningi 6gb or even with raid mode 6gb wont touch a 3gb ssd?

 

[ckryan]

The most important thing to remember is that you could stripe your HDDs together and get some impressive sequential numbers, but there is much more to a SSD than sequential performance. Small file random performance doesn't scale, so your HDDs won't get more than about 2MBs for 4K randoms. Secondly all of the access times are still going to be like 20 to 50 TIMES higher.

That's important to remember when RAIDing SSDs too. You'll get much higher seqential perfomance, even doubling most of the time. But you'll still have the same random performance as one drive, so the net gain isn't like 2X except for large sequentials. RAID 0 is good if you're needing to transfer really large files from one drive to another, but you won't scale below the stripe size.

 

[gjs278]

so without raid mode runningi 6gb or even with raid mode 6gb wont touch a 3gb ssd?

I can confirm that two blacks in 6gb/s raid0 together will not beat an intel 510, patriot wildfire, or crucial m4 in performance. if you are looking at different drives, let me know and I'll let you know where they stand performance wise.

 

[ckryan]

I can confirm that two blacks in 6gb/s raid0 together will not beat an intel 510, patriot wildfire, or crucial m4 in performance. if you are looking at different drives, let me know and I'll let you know where they stand performance wise.

I have the same drives (well, I have a Chronos Deluxe instead of the Wildfire, but they're identical and made in the same factory in Texas), and two blacks in RAID won't really beat them in any metric. It depends on how you look at it, but maybe large sequential writes is the only area where you might pull ahead.

 

[XdVeLoPeX]

basiclly i dont have them raided atm one has files one has os and games wanted to raid them or get an ssd because my hdd score is 5.9 and everyhting else s 7.something will i SEE/FEEL the 200$ hit from the ssd is it worth the upgrdade i dont xfer files and wahtnot just video gaming

 

[Impulse]

basiclly i dont have them raided atm one has files one has os and games wanted to raid them or get an ssd because my hdd score is 5.9 and everyhting else s 7.something will i SEE/FEEL the 200$ hit from the ssd is it worth the upgrdade i dont xfer files and wahtnot just video gaming

It depends... Personally I think a SSD is the best kind of upgrade you can do to almost any recent system, but if you mostly game w/your PC and you don't do a lot of work or multi-tasking on it then it might not be worthwhile for you. SSDs do help w/some types of games, namely MMORPGs and some sims (cuts down on loading/stutter when zones are pre-loaded or large numbers of players are around)...

They have less of an impact on other games, sure it might cut a few seconds off a level load on an FPS, but if other players can't load the level as fast as you then it won't make any difference; under some games it might not even cut down on load times because the GPU/CPU will bottleneck texture unpacking and other elements and the drive isn't really the bottleneck.

If you multi-task a lot w/your PC or you want to improve the general feel of loading programs, booting, etc then go for it. For gaming exclusively, meh...

 

[XdVeLoPeX]

i only game and thats it no rendering etc so i dont care about load times I was under the impression if i upgraded to ssd (even if raided or not on these drives) i would see a increase in game smoothness (not a fps change)

 

[Old Hippie]

It's a no-brainer.

Any decent single SSD will easily outperform those drives in RAID0.

 

[Impulse]

It wont affect game smoothness at all unless the game is poorly pre loading textures in the background or something (MMORPGs do lots of that which it's why it notably helps there), neither would RAID (might have the opposite effect actually, tho rare).

 

[ckryan]

I run my games off of SSDs and some games benefit greatly in terms of load times. Anything with the Gamebryo engine like Fallout 3/New Vegas and Oblivion/Skyrim have no transition loading times anymore. You won't really get a boost to framerates, and some games' loading screens are not storage bound (but rather just decompressing large numbers of texture files etc.).

Deus Ex loads pretty fast too to a certain point. Tom's hardware did a good article on how a SSD benefits gaming, so you might want to check that out.

 

[jwcalla]

basiclly i dont have them raided atm one has files one has os and games wanted to raid them or get an ssd because my hdd score is 5.9 and everyhting else s 7.something will i SEE/FEEL the 200$ hit from the ssd is it worth the upgrdade i dont xfer files and wahtnot just video gaming

It's practically a mortal sin to have the system you list in your sig without an SSD. For heaven's sake, man... do it for the children.