RAID0 SSD - Pros and Cons

Landmine

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 19, 2011
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402
I'll like to compile a full list of the Pros and Cons of running two Solid State Drivers in a RAID0. Please post your input below and I'll update this post with those details.

The drive I currently have is a Crucial M4 ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148443 ) and I'm looking to either get another 256GB or buy a 512GB

Single Drive
M4Single.png


RAID0
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Pros
  • Larger Single Virtual Disk
  • More cost effective for those with an SSD already or looking for larger storage with an SSD

Cons
  • No TRIM Support
  • Requires an additional SATA Cable Set
  • Less reliable than single drive
  • Less performance than a single drive in random transfers (Almost zero real-life performance benefit)
 
Last edited:
more cons:
- less reliable than single drive
- less performance than a single drive in random transfers (where it actually matters)
 
I've tried it with a few drives. Not worth the effort. Unless you are running specific tasks with lots of small random data, you will see almost zero real-life performance benefit.
 
Has anyone experimented with spanning the drives with a single drive latter instead of RAID?
 
I'd say:

Pros:
Better random write performance with multiple applications reading/writing
Cons:
Slightly poorer random write performance with a single aplication

Seems pretty logical to me since single random 4k reads slightly decrease in speed, though when more threads are used (aka, QD > 1), raid will give a pretty nice performance boost
 
I'm still on a X58 I7 930. My motherboard only has SATA2 and it limits my fast SSD to 250 meg / second read and write. RAID 0 will get me around that limitation at the cost of TRIM, but TRIM isn't that necessary since the drives would need to degrade pretty heavily to hit my SATA2 bottle neck.

The M4 has pretty high reads, but slow writes. Putting it in RAID will easily double your write speeds.
 
So it's a bad idea is the general feeling I'm getting.

The only bad idea is if you don't try it yourself.

Personally I can see the difference but others can't, won't, or just speculate.

It is necessary to have a back-up but if you're not running one now you're not really a RAID candidate anyway. :)
 
It's good to be busy doing something interresting - time flies... Been there, done that.....

PROS:
You will be busy running benchmarks
You will be busy comparing those benchmarks to others on internet
You will be busy tweaking settings
You will be busy running benchmarks and comapring again
You will be busy comparing those benchmarks to others on internet
You will be busy saying again and again how fast your drive is....
You will be busy....

CONS:
That empty feeling that you wasted so much time and money to have Photoshop open in 2.643 seconds instead of 2.701 seconds and windows loading in 18.579 instead of 19.322 seconds....

It's still good to be busy.......

BTW, for ultimate orgasmic satisfaction go with Areca HW card with 4GB cache and 8x60GB SSD..........
 
Everything I care about is stored on my Server. I just want my desktop to have a larger hard drive for applications and games. I needed to reinstall Windows soon anyways, so I think I'll get another 256 and try it out. Worse case, I have another 256 on another drive.

Thanks all, good post.
 
I did RAID 0 with SSD's simply because I wanted a drive larger than 128gb to store my OS and programs on, and 2 of the 128gb drives were about $100 cheaper than the 256gb drive.

If the 256 is the same price as two of the 128's there's no justification for 2 in raid 0, just get the bigger one to start with.
 
Everything I care about is stored on my Server. I just want my desktop to have a larger hard drive for applications and games. I needed to reinstall Windows soon anyways, so I think I'll get another 256 and try it out. Worse case, I have another 256 on another drive.
Wise decision.

Even if you find RAID0 is not for you at least you'll have personal experience combined with more computer knowledge and you can never have enough of either one. :)

Get some decent back-up software (I use Acronis) and make an image of your single drive install before going to the RAID set-up. Acronis is also great with RAID0 arrays.

Hopefully you have an Intel based MB to get the best out of your drives.

Do a little reading about the RAID install (online or MB manual) so you don't get frustrated right off the bat. :)

It's not hard.....if it was I couldn't have done it! LOL!
 
There was a time that going RAID0 with 2 x 64GB drives or 2 x 128GB drives was way more cost effective than a single drive in the larger size and thus a lot of people were doing it. That time has passed.
 
There was a time that going RAID0 with 2 x 64GB drives or 2 x 128GB drives was way more cost effective than a single drive in the larger size and thus a lot of people were doing it. That time has passed.

I had raid 0 2xOCZ Agility 64gb back in the day on my Q6600. There wasn't TRIM support yet, and SATA3 wasn't out. The agility was one of the first drives with aggressive garbage collection. I paid $500 both 64gb drives. Oh how the time passes.
 
I did RAID 0 on a pair of Mushkins on my laptop until it wasn't enough room anymore. :(
Speed wise it was definitely noticeable and the lack of TRIM didn't seem to matter as the built in garbage collection worked fine. I would still be doing it if it weren't for the fact it was a pair of 120's and I need 300GB of space now.
 
Can someone explain TRIM to me? I've looked and it seems like everything is written just right so I dont get it.
 
TRIM is the way the OS is able to tell a drive that certain sectors are no longer using data. This aids the wear leveling on the drive because it will allow the drive to forget data instead of copying and shuffling around sectors that do not contain valid files.
 
So on a scale from 1 (It's like themes) to 10 (Boot.ini who needs that) important is this?
 
Not really. Themes would have the same importance as boot.ini in case of TRIM. What would be 1 in your example is a file you just deleted and 10 would be all existing files and data on the disk. And there would be no other levels.

Again the OS reports what sectors are deleted (after a deletion) to the SSD so when the SSD needs to garbage collect and it sees a whole cell is not used it need not copy it to a new cell for wear leveling.
 
BTW, for ultimate orgasmic satisfaction go with Areca HW card with 4GB cache and 8x60GB SSD..........

Been there, done that. ;)

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For sustained, "saturate the bus" writes of terabyte video files, it's a must. ;)
 
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