VelociRaptor Raid0 vs SSD

[Roadhouse]

Considering an upgrade from my old Core 2 Duo 6850/ASUS ROG X48 to a new i7 960 or 970 setup. I currently have two VelociRaptor 300GB drives in raid0 for OS and programs that I would like to reuse. MY question is would I see that great a difference with new SSD vs the Raptors in WIN7?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

[beginner99]

Yes, ssd will be much faster as an OS drive.

Most modern 7200 rpm drives are as fast or faster than these old velociraptors. (there are new versions but they are also much slower than an ssd).

The only part where these 2 in raid0 might be faster is in sequential write speed vs. certain ssd's (like the intel one). But large sequential writes are rare IMHO on OS disks and other ssd's like the crucial one will stil be faster than raid0 raptors.

The advantage of ssd is in random reads and writes where they are magnitudes faster than HDD's. And what does the OS do? "Tons" of random reads and writes. If your computer is stuttering, in most cases it's due to the hdd's.

With ssd your system will be much more responsive and boot and application load times will be much faster.

Downside is of course price per gigabyte that's why it's still rather exotic to have an ssd. I don't know anyone in RL except me.

 

[Roadhouse]

Thanks for the repsonse. Sounds like I should keep the VRs for apps and games and put the OS on a SSD. Price is not really a big factor, spent a bundle on the VRs a couple of years ago and they have a few more years of use on them yet.

 

[emoreas]

Hi guys, after a year (or two ) of controlling the upgrade-itis I had the almost the same question with one difference, i would use the new velociraptors (600gb) because I do a lot of video encoding. My laptop has an intel ssd and it's great in responsiveness but I was wondering (due to the reviews of the new raptors on the storagereview site) if this isn't the way to go to combine speed and room? Bram

 

[Zap]

Thanks for the repsonse. Sounds like I should keep the VRs for apps and games and put the OS on a SSD. Price is not really a big factor

Since you say price is not a big factor, my suggestion is to get a mid to larger sized SSD (meaning something larger than the typical 30/32/40GB "boot" SSDs) for Windows and Applications, and use your VelociRaptors for games and data.

 

[beginner99]

Hi guys, after a year (or two ) of controlling the upgrade-itis I had the almost the same question with one difference, i would use the new velociraptors (600gb) because I do a lot of video encoding. My laptop has an intel ssd and it's great in responsiveness but I was wondering (due to the reviews of the new raptors on the storagereview site) if this isn't the way to go to combine speed and room? Bram

For laptop if ssd is to small or a big one to expensive I would go with the seagate momentus XT hybrid drive. It's much cheaper than ssds but offers better performance than hdds with a resoanable size (like 500 gb).

For desktop 1 ssd + as many hdds for storage you need. For video encoding an ssd + raid0 array sure is a very good option. Velociraptors are not worth the price. 2 of the newest 7200 rpm HDDs in raid0 won't be much slower than 2 velociraptors.

The advantage of the ssd is random reads and writes and the velociraptor is not muh better there than normal hdds (+ it's not really relevant for video-encoding)

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3636/...ociraptor-vr200m-10k-rpm-at-450gb-and-600gb/3

Note that the old velociraptor is actually slower than a new 1 TB 7200 rpm drive.
Also look at the noise levels. raptors are loud bastards. 50 vs 60 db is a huge difference.

Simply said new velociraptors IMHO are a waste of money for the price.

 

[emoreas]

Hello,

thanks for the advice, you really helped me out with the dillema.
I will go for an ssd + recent 7200 rpm hd. Maybe this question is way out of the original post but if i put 2 recent hdds in raid for video, will the ssd on the same sata controller (intel ichr 10) will be on ahci or on sata because i will have to choose.
Thanks, Bram

 

[beginner99]

What I know is that the intel matrix storage driver (or whatever it is called) in it's newest incarnation passes TRIM commands to ssd's that are on the controller but are not part of any raid array. so yes this setup should theoretically work but have no experience about it myself.

 

[lsv]

2 SSDs in raid

 

[jimhsu]

What I know is that the intel matrix storage driver (or whatever it is called) in it's newest incarnation passes TRIM commands to ssd's that are on the controller but are not part of any raid array. so yes this setup should theoretically work but have no experience about it myself.

RST 9.6: Yes.

Is there TRIM support for RAID configurations?

Intel® Rapid Storage Technology 9.6 supports TRIM in AHCI mode and in RAID mode for drives that are not part of a RAID volume.

 

[darckhart]

OP: i went from 10k rpm 300gb VR to intel 80gb ssd as os drive. i'm not impressed with the "speed" improvements. i am impressed with the decrease in heat, power consumption, and whoa, no vibration from 10k rpm.

bram: i came from the 10k rpm VRs. i rip large files and encode large files and then move large files. large file sequential read/write is key for me.

unless you plan on doing whole lots of stuff on your OS drive, buying ssds isnt worth the speed nor the money imo.

 

[jjmIII]

Intel® Rapid Storage Technology 9.6

Caused blue screens on the SSD in my sig.

 

[Emulex]

the main gain from 10K rpm is latency seek time which is 3-4ms versus 7-10ms iirc. and given the super parallel design of ssd; that is near zero like 0.001 depending on the number of chips, controller, ram, etc. it is capable of doing heavy command queue iops that physically a hard drive will be 10,100,1000,10K times slower. going through your IE cache/cookies would be an example of where ssd would decimate hard drive.

vibrations are a real bitch -subwoofers or stomping (esp hardwoods) can do real damage and cause seek failures to drives - in htpc this is very real if you have kids running around the room and a 12" sub firing - so i run an SSD for o/s and network storage in the basement (nfs/smb/iscsi or all) to eliminate such problems.

I think you will be more impressed with the next gen designs since they will have higher capacity for similar price (500$ 320gb x25-m) once the demand settles.

plus of course 99% of your "suckiness" is in the raid controller itself. modern raid controllers use 1GB of ram tweakable for read-ahead/write-back so you get an extra boost - simple raid-0 isn't going to give you that mojo so you rely on the measly drive cache which is really on the wrong side of the bus to make intelligent decisions.

plus you can spin up/down SSD much faster and far more times than a Vraptor - last time i checked they were like enterprise - very low power up/down cycles since most people run them always on.

 

[emoreas]

Hi guys,

thank you so much for the advice and the examples of the real pc usage scenario's. Somtimes reviews are making newbies like me sometimes more confused than i'm already am ^_^
I do agree that the next generation ssd's will bring more capacity and performance. The problem is that my current harddisks are failing on me and I need a solution in the next two weeks.

Darkchart, i'm using my pc like you are. Are you using now an ssd as an os disk and a regular harddrive for files (and if so, which one)?

Bram

 

[dj4005]

I had the same questions when I built my new machine a couple of months ago. I compromised (!) by putting both an Intel SSD and pair of 300 GB Velociraptors in RAID0 configuration. The SSD houses my OS and apps and data that I need (want) fast - the RAID holds my data files.

I benchmarked it shortly after the build using HD Tune. I wish I could paste the graphics, but here are the results (with apologies for formatting:

Transfer Rate SSD Raid0

Minimum 157.8 132.0
Maximum 220.9 203.7
Average 214.5 163.5

Access Time 0.1 7.0

Burst Rate 135.4 134.9

Draw your own conclusions - and of course, your mileage may vary.

 

[emoreas]

Thanks DJ for the figures,

I'm no expert but all these figures are way better than my old hdd's.
My own conclusion is somewhat clouded by the fact that i have read a lot of people who are having issues restoring images of their os on a ssd. I do image quite often because i try different software that i don't want on my system anymore after the try. Maybe some regular hdd's for the time are the better option for the time being?
Bram

 

[Voo]

OP: i went from 10k rpm 300gb VR to intel 80gb ssd as os drive. [...]
bram: i came from the 10k rpm VRs. i rip large files and encode large files and then move large files. large file sequential read/write is key for me.

Just to be clear... you especially need fast sequential read/write and got an INTEL drive? Those known for their abysmal sequential write performance and are now wondering why the SSD isn't as fast as it should be? Hmm dunno, probably has something to do with the fact that every modern 7.2k rpm drive has faster sequential write than a 80gb Intel SSD.

New SSDs (especially the SF drives, though there you get the problem with benchmarks) have great sequential write speed as well - but the most important thing for an OS drive is usually access time (and random r/w which more or less depends on that), not sequential r/w.
If you're interested in that 7.2k RPM high density drives in RAID are probably the best from a price/performance/size perspective - actually the VR will probably be worse (or at least not better) than any modern 7.2k RPM drive, so that's most possible the worst thing to get for that stuff.

@dj4005: That benchmark is rather useless since the only important metric for a OS drive that you're testing is the access time - how about random 4k read?

 

[Emulex]

4K random read/write is what counts - sequential is for benchmark queens. IOPS is all that matters for 99% of the folks out there.

 

[dj4005]

@dj4005: That benchmark is rather useless since the only important metric for a OS drive that you're testing is the access time - how about random 4k read?

A lot, if not most, of this argument is application driven. I'd have killed for drives like the SSD back when I was doing technical stock analysis.

It's far less of a consideration now that the bulk of my work is in graphics and sound editing.

To be perfectly honest, I didn't want discussions like this to be the basis of my decision. I got both the SSD and the RAID0 so that I could make my evaluation based on MY usage.

I think that the SSD is still early in it's product cycle and we'll likely see more and more from it as it matures - especially in terms of cost effectiveness. I'll deal with that as it happens.

 

[Voo]

A lot, if not most, of this argument is application driven. I'd have killed for drives like the SSD back when I was doing technical stock analysis.

It's far less of a consideration now that the bulk of my work is in graphics and sound editing.

Well but you still need a fast OS drive (which still falls under your "application driven" argument, but since everyone needs one ) - that doesn't mean a SSD has to be the best thing for the rest of your data.

If you're doing lots of graphics and sound editing where I'd assume lots of space and fast sequential r/w are the most important things, it's only logical that some high density 7.2k rpm drives in raid will deliver the best results.. even 25nm flash won't make SSDs cheap enough to compete in that regard (at least not until we hit a certain budget and get practical problems with just raiding tons of hdds together).

We'll still be using HDDs for a long time, since I don't think we'll get near those $/gb marks we get from HDDs for the next few years - the only drives that will be/are useless on short term are the VRs.