SSD raid, does it make sense or waste of time?

[Spike]

I'm building a new gaming PC and, due to deals, I have two samsung evo 250GB's coming in for use as gaming drives (I have a samsung pro for the OS). Any thoughts on whether it makes sense to raid them as one single drive or just use them separately? The only problem with a raid that I see is the potential for one drive to go down and the other becomes unreadable, but as these will be gaming drives, they won't have critical data I can't just re-download on them.

Thoughts?

thanks!

 

[razel]

If you have proven to yourself that you NEED the bandwidth, then it's not a waste of time. If you have never setup a RAID before and want to learn how do setup different types, then it's not waste of time.

Otherwise, it's not worth it to RAID SSDs for 95% of people. They are already highly parallel and are essentially already highly optimized, advanced RAID of NAND.

 

[Spike]

If you have proven to yourself that you NEED the bandwidth, then it's not a waste of time. If you have never setup a RAID before and want to learn how do setup different types, then it's not waste of time.

Otherwise, it's not worth it to RAID SSDs for 95% of people. They are already highly parallel and are essentially already highly optimized, advanced RAID of NAND.

Thanks for the info, I have not setup a raid in many years so I might do this just for the heck of it. It would be slightly more convenient to have them showing as one drive for installation purposes, but otherwise it looks like the benefits are minimal.

 

[Topweasel]

Thanks for the info, I have not setup a raid in many years so I might do this just for the heck of it. It would be slightly more convenient to have them showing as one drive for installation purposes, but otherwise it looks like the benefits are minimal.

Once you have enough memory and get above 200ish mbs, the big advantage for an SSD is the near instantaneous random access. So yeah the actual advantages are nill.

 

[mikeymikec]

If you have proven to yourself that you NEED the bandwidth, then it's not a waste of time.

Furthermore, where's the extra bandwidth coming from exactly? It's not from SATA 6Gbps, which a single decent and modern SSD utilises about 80-100% of.

 

[Data-Medics]

If the chance of data loss isn't an issue, then go for the RAID. You probably won't see a huge difference in OS/program load times, but sequential read/writes will see a boost.

Besides if an SSD fails the cost of recovery will be high regardless of whether it's a single SSD or two in an array.

 

[Spike]

If the chance of data loss isn't an issue, then go for the RAID. You probably won't see a huge difference in OS/program load times, but sequential read/writes will see a boost.

Besides if an SSD fails the cost of recovery will be high regardless of whether it's a single SSD or two in an array.

I'm not really worried about loss of data in this case, I would only be installing games on the array and I can always re-download those quickly.

It looks like I might as well go for it since there are some, albeit small, benefits and the downsides are minimal. If I lose a drive I would likely have lost it anyway, so no real difference there.

 

[razel]

Furthermore, where's the extra bandwidth coming from exactly? It's not from SATA 6Gbps, which a single decent and modern SSD utilises about 80-100% of.

It depends on your chipset and motherboard. A motherboard with multiple SATA controllers can software RAID and allieviate that limitation. I tried before Windows software RAIDing dynamic disks off SATA and eSATA off my laptop. Lots of fun? and learned what a rickety structure that is.

 

[Spike]

It depends on your chipset and motherboard. A motherboard with multiple SATA controllers can software RAID and allieviate that limitation. I tried before Windows software RAIDing dynamic disks off SATA and eSATA off my laptop. Lots of fun? and learned what a rickety structure that is.

I have an Asrock Z97 Extreme6 coming for the setup. No idea what raid modes it supports, I'll have to take a look.

 

[mrpiggy]

If you're doing it for fun, then go for it. If you actually expect to see any noticeable i/o improvements outside of benchmarks, then don't bother. You stated they will be "gaming drives"; just know you won't get diddly squat improvement in any games (like FPS, or load times). SSD Raid won't hurt, but won't help in that regard. With HD's it made sense because HD's suck so bad in random access times. With SSD's near instantaneous access times, adding RAID just adds i/o overhead that offsets any real-world gains except under very specific circumstances (like particular disk benchmarks).

 

[Spike]

If you're doing it for fun, then go for it. If you actually expect to see any noticeable i/o improvements outside of benchmarks, then don't bother. You stated they will be "gaming drives"; just know you won't get diddly squat improvement in any games (like FPS, or load times). SSD Raid won't hurt, but won't help in that regard. With HD's it made sense because HD's suck so bad in random access times. With SSD's near instantaneous access times, adding RAID just adds i/o overhead that offsets any real-world gains except under very specific circumstances (like particular disk benchmarks).

That settles it, I'll give it a whirl simply to try it. I don't need any boosts in performance, the increase that comes along with an SSD alone makes me happy.