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SSD Raid OS Drives

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Dmac122383

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 15, 2011
Messages
437
I'm looking to get a SSD Raid set up to use as my boot/os drive.

What would be the minimum size for just win7 and standard programs? 60gb or 80gbs?

I'm looking to have a raid set up for the performance boost over my single 128gb crucial c300 SATA3. Will I notice a huge jump in performance/load times if i went with 2 SATA2 drives over SATA3 drives?
I'd then use the 128gb SSD for Steam Games, and WoW.

Any tips on sizes and SSD models would be great.

Thanks
 
While that is a good ssd choice, running them in raid might add to your boot time as it can take a minute to load the raid array. Best bet would be to get the largest ssd you can right now and add others later.
 
They are both fast and you probably won't notice the difference outside a benchmark. I would just get a big drive. The C400 has been great as its well priced, highly available, reliable, and offers good performance.

Heres my 80GB X25 G2's in Raid vs my C400 with the latest firmware
oldvsnewssdupdatedfirmware.png
 
One thing to watch out for is that the lower capacity drives tend to be slower than the higher capacity models. One reason for this is because many manufacturers will simply cut the channels in half, effectively cutting the performance also in half. For example, the M4 64GB now uses 25nm flash of higher density, and therefore only requires 4 channels, so you get half the performance of the 128GB model which still uses all 8 channels; this scenario also applies to the Vertex2's - not sure what other drives, since I haven't researched other drives in a while, hehe, sorry.

As for what size you need, it really depends on your habits. Personally, my Win7 OS/App partition is only using 25GB. However, my buddy has every single game installed and his 100GB partition had to be re-sized, lol. Oh, and as Anand pointed out in one of his articles, despite the lack of TRIM support for RAID volumes, you can still maintain performance over time by leaving 10% of each drive unpartitioned.

As for speed, if you dont have a SATA600 controller, using RAID0 with the newer, higher capacity SSDs will saturate your bandwidth.

In regards to loading the array, it really depends on your sata controller. I've noticed that the newer boards load arrays faster than before, and they've also improved overall boot time with UEFI, so the extra 5 seconds is negligible.
 
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