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To RAID or not to RAID...

J

JCNiest5

Supreme [H]ardness
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...that is the question if the drives are SSDs. SSDs are fast enough by themselves, so would an SSD RAID be even faster? Thinking of pairing two 120GB SSDs (different brand) but then I wonder since SATAIII can only transfer up to 6GBs, so can two SSDs in RAID transfer at 12GBs? I must be crazy... :D
 
SSDs are fast enough by themselves, so would an SSD RAID be even faster?
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It will make them faster in benchmarks but not so much faster in real life. First off SSDs are in RAID0 internally. Why does RAID0 not help real world usage as much is the following? RAID0 can double the sequential transfer rate but that is probably not what you use your SSD for and SSDs are already plenty fast in STR. I mean how many applications load large files sequentially to memory? Remember if your drive can read at 500 MB/s it will take ~2 seconds to read a GB file sequentially and ~1 second if you RAID0 but again not many applications do this. One reason is most applications are 32 bit which limits how much they can load into the 2GB or 3GB of address space that windows gives a 32 bit application. On top of that applications are usually targeted at the average system with a hard drive.. Anyways this is not even the main benefit of an SSD over hard drives (I have software raid 6 arrays at work that read at over 900 MB/s). The main benefit of SSDs is reading and writing of random data. This is where SSDs are orders of magnitude faster than hard disks. This is also where SSDs do not really improve much in RAID0. I believe the reason is an SSD needs to read / write at a minimum sized block. 128k? Under this size read/write you can not improve by raid.
 
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If that's the case, then I guess I will just put the drive to good use on a different PC.

Off topic: It looks like my Crucial M4 128GB is really slow (according to CrystalDiskMark 3) comparing to my two other SSDs (OCZ Agility 3 and Patriot Pyro SE).
 
Compare the bottom 3 rows of CDM and ignore the first row. The first row is a STR benchmark.
 
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If you do RAID them, don't skimp on the controller. Without a cache it can make the SSD slower than a standard SATA drive.
 
ryang said:
If you do RAID them, don't skimp on the controller. Without a cache it can make the SSD slower than a standard SATA drive.
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Although once you spend $400+ on the card you probably should have purchased a ~$600 512GB M4 or similar SSD on eBay instead.
 
I just learned you can get a pretty good hardware RAID card for $60.
 
kumquat said:
I just learned you can get a pretty good hardware RAID card for $60.
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I have serious doubts there is a single sub $100 card that will have better RAID0 performance than ICH10R, and when I say "better", I mean a difference you can see in real use, not just with benchmark tools.

If someone can point to one, I'll probably be buying it in short order.
 
intel's PCH 6G controller is the sweet, cheap spot for modern SSDs. You'd have to spend a TON to surpass it's performance. I think you've been fooled on your $60 idea - hopefully you haven't bought it yet.
 
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