RAID0 SSD for Program/Data drive or stay with mechanical?

[ShepsCrook]

I use my main computer for Gaming 98% of the time, and photoshop and web design 2% of the time. I currently have 1x Transcend 256GB 320 SSD for OS and 2x WD640AALS SATA2 drives in RAID0 for programs and data.

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3R.

I am going to replace my OS drive to the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB, however I my debate is whether I should pick up another Sandisk Ultra 256GB to RAID0 with the one I have sitting around and have those as my RAID0 Program/Data drives with the 840 Pro as my OS drive.

OR

I just pick up 2x 1TB WD Black SATA3 mechanical drives and use those for the RAID0 setup.

Other things things to consider:

I have a server with 16TB of free HD space so I don't need storage.
I only play a select few games (Left 4 Dead 2, Dead Island, Ultima Online) so I don't use up a lot of storage for game data.

 

[Brahmzy]

Put everything on SSDs you can afford....

 

[Aesma]

Yeah, but why bother with RAID0 at all ?

Don't forget backups.

 

[staticlag]

Practically I would say that a SSD alone is fast enough for all your needs.

personally if you have the cash I would do a RAID0 for games just for fun/overkill

 

[bexamous]

What would be the reason for not using SSDs? Even if your SATA controller didn't support RAID + TRIM, I'd still use SSDs. Although if not your OS drive I guess you can just use Window's built in raid and then you could still get TRIM.

 

[ShepsCrook]

Yeah, I'm thinking I'm going to move to pure SSD

Now I just need to get a set of the SAME SSDs.

 

[ekiro]

Put everything on SSDs you can afford....

Yep. Totally agree with that. Put as much as you can afford onto PCI based flash storage. The fastest of the fast!

 

[ShepsCrook]

If there were any PCI based SSD's that weren't OCZ, I'd actually consider it. lol

 

[PointandClick]

Why not just reuse the ssd's you have for programs/data and forget about raid? I really doubt the difference will be perceptible moving from ssd > raid0 ssd.

 

[schmuckley]

I'd say yes..
but backup to the HDDs you have regularly.
Forget it if they're Sandforce drives..They die.
If it's them 840 Pros in your sig..definitely!

 

[John**]

Earlier SF controller had few problems relating to firmware. Its all good with the latest series of SF based SSDs. As a general rule of thumb, we will need to make sure any SSD for that matter is having the latest firmwares.

 

[drescherjm]

If there were any PCI based SSD's that weren't OCZ, I'd actually consider it. lol

If there were any PCIe based SSDs that were actually a PCIe based SSD and did not cost an arm and a leg. OCZs stuff was not PCIe based. It was internally a cheap SATA raid controller attached to SATA SSDs. You could do much better with LSI MegaRaid + FastPath if you were going that route.