SSD or RAID Setup

M

mytechuniverse

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I currently have a dilemma. I was looking at this SSD. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167023 However, for just a tad more money I could setup a set of 4 7200 RPM 1TB drives. I know I'm still a noob to this forum, but really need some help here. My knowledge of RAID is limited to what I've read on Wikipedia. I would also like to note that I'm looking at this purely from a speed view because I already have a 1TB drive that suits my needs perfectly. I want the fastest setup. Which is better?
 
Fast doing what? 4x1TB drives are going to be faster in terms of pure transfer rates, while the Intel 80GB drive is going to have fast access times and excellent random read/write times.

On one hand you have 4 terabytes of space, on the other hand you're comparing a 80 GB drive. Not really a apples to apples comparison there.
 
What xnoodle said. RAID doesn't do anything about the latency of a platter-based HDD. For small random accesses (the kind that are most common for OS and "regular app" usage), the HDD still has to physically move the head around and find the data. If it's a small chunk of data, it then has to move to the next small chunk of data, and then over to the next small chunk, etc. If it's a big chunk of data, RAID can help because once it's gotten to the data, the multiple drives can access that data in parallel. For example, a single drive might be able to access it at 100MB/s, so two drives can access it at 200MB/s.

While a VelociRaptor might have an access time of 5ms and a regular HDD 10ms, good SSDs are 0.1ms. The HDD numbers are probably a bit optimistic even, but they make for nice round comparisons. A VR will take 50x as long to get to the data, and a regular HDD 100x as long, compared to SSD. If you're jumping around reading little bits of data, then most of the time will be spent getting to the data in a HDD. RAID striping won't really affect that.
 
InvisiBill said:
What xnoodle said. RAID doesn't do anything about the latency of a platter-based HDD. For small random accesses (the kind that are most common for OS and "regular app" usage), the HDD still has to physically move the head around and find the data. If it's a small chunk of data, it then has to move to the next small chunk of data, and then over to the next small chunk, etc. If it's a big chunk of data, RAID can help because once it's gotten to the data, the multiple drives can access that data in parallel. For example, a single drive might be able to access it at 100MB/s, so two drives can access it at 200MB/s.

While a VelociRaptor might have an access time of 5ms and a regular HDD 10ms, good SSDs are 0.1ms. The HDD numbers are probably a bit optimistic even, but they make for nice round comparisons. A VR will take 50x as long to get to the data, and a regular HDD 100x as long, compared to SSD. If you're jumping around reading little bits of data, then most of the time will be spent getting to the data in a HDD. RAID striping won't really affect that.
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O.K. I appreciate the help. I'm still deciding, but I think I'll go for the SSD option. I have plenty of storage, so what I want is a good boot and application drive. Also, I'm probably going to be recording FRAPS videos in full HD on it. At this point I just wish my program files folder was smaller because Win 7 plus it is nearly all of the storage on an SSD. One more question though. Is there a good program for moving the programs and Windows to the other drive, or do I still just have to re-install Windows?
 
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