- Feb 8, 2008
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I was looking into getting the Crucial M4.
My first concern is, my mobo only has SATA II (3Gb/s). Will I even notice the speed improvement with an SSD over my 2 x 7200RPM in RAID0? I don't want to buy a SATA II SSD because one day I will probably upgrade to a newer mobo.
My second concern is, which SSDs to buy. My desktop really only has around 200GB of stuff on it, most of it is games + the OS. I want everything to be faster so I really would like all of my games and apps to fit on the SSD. A 128 GB drive might be too small. I think a 256 GB drive would be good and give me a little more room for growth, and I can also start thinking about what I need to move onto a secondary storage drive. I was thinking that it might be worth it to buy 2x128GB SSDs and run them in RAID0 vs a 256GB SSD. I've done some reading and I've read that SSDs in RAID aren't necessarily the best idea because they don't work with TRIM so performance can degrade over time. I've also read that the garbage collection on the drives themselves makes this not as much of an issue. I'm not sure if the motherboard plays any role in this but I have an EX58-UD3R mother board (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128375) which has two different chipsets, although to be honest I'm not entirely sure what that means!
What do you guys think?
My first concern is, my mobo only has SATA II (3Gb/s). Will I even notice the speed improvement with an SSD over my 2 x 7200RPM in RAID0? I don't want to buy a SATA II SSD because one day I will probably upgrade to a newer mobo.
My second concern is, which SSDs to buy. My desktop really only has around 200GB of stuff on it, most of it is games + the OS. I want everything to be faster so I really would like all of my games and apps to fit on the SSD. A 128 GB drive might be too small. I think a 256 GB drive would be good and give me a little more room for growth, and I can also start thinking about what I need to move onto a secondary storage drive. I was thinking that it might be worth it to buy 2x128GB SSDs and run them in RAID0 vs a 256GB SSD. I've done some reading and I've read that SSDs in RAID aren't necessarily the best idea because they don't work with TRIM so performance can degrade over time. I've also read that the garbage collection on the drives themselves makes this not as much of an issue. I'm not sure if the motherboard plays any role in this but I have an EX58-UD3R mother board (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128375) which has two different chipsets, although to be honest I'm not entirely sure what that means!
What do you guys think?