HELP: SSD Caching and HHD RAID 0

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JayCraig

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Jan 12, 2014
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I am building my first gaming PC and have been reading about SSD's, Hybrid Drives, HDD and RAID 0 and it gets a little confusing.

I just had a few questions as to what would be the best and fastest means of handling my storage.

I have a 128 GB SSD and 2 1tb mechanical hard drives at the moment.

I was wondering if I should add a partition of 60GB to the SSD for the OS and use the remainder for Caching. I would also like to put my 2 1TB mechanical hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration.

So is it possible for me to use the SSD for my OS and the remainder for caching, for my RAID 0 configuration to help speed up RAID?
I don't really want my OS on the RAID drive due to the risk of losing everything.

Or what would be the best setup to use.

Thanks.
 
Solution
geofelt
For best performance, put your active files on the ssd. Do not let the ssd fill up past 90%
If you have not set your sata mode to AHCI do that to enable trim.

On the hard drives, keep them defragged.
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popatim

popatim

Titan
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Dec 2, 2009
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If you have no backup plan then I would suggest that you OS & Caching on th SSD and put the 1tb's as single drives using the second as your internal backup drive.

If you have a backup strategy then what you suggest is fine.

What I find odd is you say you dont want the OS on the raid0 for the risk of losing everything but you still only have it on 1 drive and if it (the SSD) dies you still lose it! <Grin>
 
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geofelt

geofelt

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Oct 9, 2006
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Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential overlapped manner.

A hard drive cache works only for a few unusual situations.
It is generally better to have a single large ssd.
 
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J

JayCraig

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Jan 12, 2014
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haha yeah I guess there is always the risk of losing the SSD, but I thought that there is more of a risk losing your data when using RAID 0. The RAID drive will just be loaded with games so I don't care if I lose those I can just reinstall them (I always back up my games).
 
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geofelt

geofelt

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Oct 9, 2006
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A hard drive is about 2x more likely to fail than a ssd.
If you lose either of the raid-0 drives, you lose them both.
Or... if you lose the motherboard raid controller, you lose all the data also.
And, to what purpose?
Your games will not load any faster.
Only benchmarks will be faster, giving you a false sense of satisfaction.

If you want faster level loads, but a larger ssd.
 
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JayCraig

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Jan 12, 2014
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I was more or less wondering what would be the best and fastest way to manage DATA between my 128GB SSD and my 2 1TB HDD's. Not exactly worried about level loads.
I really just want the best performance out of what I already have with out buying anything more (like a larger ssd).
The above configuration was just an idea, I wasn't even sure if was possible.

 
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