Can you RAID 0 two different SSDs of the same capacity?

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jamster7777

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Jul 6, 2012
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I currently have an old Samsung 840 120gb ssd:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Series-120GB-Solid-State/dp/B009NHAF06/ref=sr_1_22?ie=UTF8&qid=1416776588&sr=8-22&keywords=120gb+ssd

I want to add another one in RAID 0 but it is so expensive now seeing as it has since been updated to the EVO and discontinued:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-120GB-Basic-Solid-State/dp/B00E3W15P0/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1416776580&sr=8-2&keywords=120gb+ssd

Could I get a 120gb EVO and RAID 0 it with my current SSD? Or even one from a completely different brand like this one:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingston-Technology-120GB-Solid-2-5-inch/dp/B00A1ZTZOG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416776580&sr=8-1&keywords=120gb+ssd

Thanks for any help you can give me, just want to know as putting two different SSDs in
RAID 0 together seems dodgy :)
 
Solution
USAFRet


As much as we'd like it to be, it isn't. SSD's already bump up against the SATA III throughput limitations. RAID 0 adds some processing overhead, so it may in fact be *slower*.
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ssds are so fast its hard to notice the difference with them in raid 0--does show in benchmarks but in real world use its hard

to tell

but you will double the size of your c drive

 
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Ah ok, thanks for pointing that out to me, I was just looking at the sequential read/write benchmarks and thinking it would be much faster.
 
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As much as we'd like it to be, it isn't. SSD's already bump up against the SATA III throughput limitations. RAID 0 adds some processing overhead, so it may in fact be *slower*.
 
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Solution


Right that makes sense. Thanks again, think I'll just wait until this one gets a bit older then buy a new, bigger one to replace it.
 
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USAFRet - slower? I get twice the speed, twice the iOPs, and in 4 way raid, nearly 4 times speed, and 4 times iOPs. Creative Cloud/Suite-wise, Corel-Suite, raid made out of SSDs is a blessing from heavens.

Gaming-wise and office-work wise it's useless. There's actually a massive performance difference, when You top at 540/520 mb/s, or You get 1100/1000, or nearly 2200/2000 mb/s.

I've seen some lame tests on the internet from some guy with A-Data SSD drives, in 4 way raid, and I couldn't believe how poor they performed.

Whenever I build a 4way raid0 array on high-end motherboard, I'm juicing the performance of SSDs at their limits.

Of course this raid0-harmony orgy cannot be achieved on weak setup. You need top-end processor and top-end motherboard, with intel controllers in 4-6 connected SATA ports. There are many boards, harboring only 2 sata ports, that are dedicated for raid0 and rest is for these lame-failure builds.
 
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And in actual use, that translates into what?

Opening a specific application.
Saving or modifying a 200MB (or 2GB) file.
Boot time.

As mentioned in the SSD + RAID 0 test I posted above - "Great For Benchmarks, Not So Much In The Real World"

Is it worth the hassle and potential fail? Personally, I don't live by benchmarks. I use the PC for what I need it to do.
 
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USAFRet - You probably missed the part about Creative Cloud [namely Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere], and Corel Suite [namely Photopaint and Draw], which use scratch space [temporary space] on hdd/ssd as a massive boost, and these files move up to tens of gigabytes, depending on the complexity and size of Your canvas.

So that's the practical application. Also, when You have more complex scene in Autodesk 3D Studio Max, or Maya, Rhinoceros, or Cinema 4D, the scratch space is about to errupt most of the times. And it's a helluva difference whether it runs 550 MB/s or twice, or it's nearly quadrupled.

So in general, that's the practical application. Oh, and one more. While using particle effects and pyro-cluster effects in Combustion [already dead platform, but still widely used], there in a plenty layer scene with lot of vertexes and particle effects, that's hell for slow systems, ssd-wise.

Just saying, it's not only for benchmarks, that's all. And security-wise, that's why I go intel way, they never died under my command, never. And anyway, who would keep important things on raid0 field? Only a guy who loves adrenaline, or a madman. That's why I house 2 raid1 arrays on my computer, for storage.

And another extremely important notice, raid0 under irst and optimized by intel ssd toolbox, has small to literally no chance to die, because ssd drives from intel don't simply die like those from samsung, if they're about to fail, they'll let You know in time, that's why they house smart, that actually works, and not like samsung, that will simply stop working from one moment to another.
 
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Yes, I use several of those applications. Photoshop, Lightroom, Premier, Rhino, etc, etc, etc.
If you have this SSD RAID 0 array as a secondary drive...a target for that scratch space...then yes, it can be quite beneficial.
The link I posted talks about exactly that.

The vast majority of people that ask this question are not attempting to use that purported RAID 0 array for that purpose, but rather for the boot or application drive.
In which case, it is mostly useless.

If you are writing from RAM to that SSD RAID, or from one RAID to another...go for it.
 
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After seeing dozens of conversations here on this, I have yet to see a single user post a screencap showing markedly faster actual, significant, results with a RAID 0 SSD array.

You might be the first. I'd love it to be so. I have 2 x Samsung 250GB drives, just waiting.
 
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Ok.
This is now is not raid is just a single ssd in ahci mode with windows 10 pro 64bit.
This ssd is brand new i bought it few days ago.
Do you see anything wrong with it?
http://postimg.org/gallery/2hy79sfjg/
 
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Okay.

If none of you know * about how RAID works, stop spewing blatant misinformation, or at least go back to school and take a computer architecture class.

RAID 0 has a noticeable speedup. The speedup you'll get from RAID 0 is n times for n drives. The capacity you'll get from RAID 0 is n times for n drives. Your mean time to failure will be divided by n.

That means for a 2x256GB RAID 0, with each drive rated at 20,000 hours, you'll have a 2x speedup, 512 GB capacity, and you'll fail in about 10,000 hours. It is almost impossible to recover from a RAID 0 failure.

RAID has very noticeable benefit on SSDs, which is why people do it all the time. Here's benchmarks from my own RAID 0 (3x256GB SSD, each drive originally rated for ~600/450 MB/s):

Code: 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2015 hiyohiyo
                           Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

   Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :  1625.392 MB/s
  Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :  1288.059 MB/s
  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :   344.739 MB/s [ 84164.8 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :   274.849 MB/s [ 67101.8 IOPS]
         Sequential Read (T= 1) :  1352.337 MB/s
        Sequential Write (T= 1) :   831.810 MB/s
   Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :    26.960 MB/s [  6582.0 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :    50.676 MB/s [ 12372.1 IOPS]

  Test : 100 MiB [C: 19.6% (136.3/693.8 GiB)] (x5)  [Interval=5 sec]
  Date : 2015/09/01 0:46:13
    OS : Windows 10  [10.0 Build 10240] (x64)


And if you do any sort of work in a content-creation environment, you will notice a speedup. If you ever play triple-A games with long loadscreens, you will notice a speedup. If you ever transfer > 500 MB files, you will notice a speedup. Hell, if you reboot your computer, you will notice a speedup.

But for the love of all that is holy, instead of saying "oh there is no difference" and then saying "oh, there is no noticeable difference", both of which are incorrect, how about you go and take a basic computer science class instead of telling people incorrect information?

/thread

(Sorry, I get riled up when people pretend to talk about something they know nothing about. Maybe he's a troll.)
 
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1. Language please. Thanks.

2. YES, a RAID 0 array DOES have benefits, in certain use cases.
Content management, moving large files around....as noted in just about every report you read about this.
Large sequential data.

The problem is, most people come into this thinking a SSD RAID 0 will magically speed up their basic C drive and operations.
 
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Emmm....... hello. I hope you are in a good mood today because i need your step by step help :)
I have 2 ssds, Samsung 850 pro 256GB and Sandisk extreme pro 240GB and i try to make a Raid 0.
BUT the speed on Raid 0 is veeeery slow.
I need your help advice PLEASE because...........
I enable raid on bios, i create a raid 0 stripe 128 ( iv tried all the stripe sizes with the same result).
Then i restart and start the format\installation of Windows 10 pro 64bit.
But the installation takes 2 hours to finish and after finishing in windows everything is veeeery sloooow start programs, installing something etc.
With just 1 ssd windows installation is finish in 5 minutes and in windows everything is fast.
What am i doing wrong? What i forgot or miss???
PLEASE help! If its possible with step by step advices.
My specs:
CASE Corsair 720t http://www.corsair.com/en/graphite-series-760t-full-tower-windowed-case
PSU EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 P2 Power Supply http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=220-P2-1000-XR
Motherboard GA-Z97X-Gaming 5 http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4953#ov
CPU i-5 4670K http://ark.intel.com/products/75048/Intel-Core-i5-4670K-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz
MEMORY RAM RAM CORSAIR CMY8GX3M2A1866C9 VENGEANCE PRO 16GB (4X4GB) DDR3 1866MHZ C9 DUAL CHANNEL KIT http://www.corsair.com/en-us/vengeance-pro-series-8gb-2-x-4gb-ddr3-dram-1866mhz-c9-memory-kit-cmy8gx3m2a1866c9
GPU GTX780-DC2OC-3GD5 http://www.asus.com/Graphics-Cards/GTX780DC2OC3GD5/
CPU COOLING CORSAIR HYDRO SERIES H90 140MM HIGH PERFORMANCE LIQUID CPU COOLER
http://www.corsair.com/en-us/hydro-series-h90-140mm-high-performance-liquid-cpu-cooler



 
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To sum up all of the comments, the answer to that question will vary with hardware tremendously. It depends on your gear/budget. If you bought a standard 3.5" SSD than there's really no point. After clearing all of your data, wasting precious writes to that disk, itll end up slower than before. The end result will just be one single RAID0 disc instead of two.

The average SATAIII (3.5") SSD's sold ~2014-now will maximize the possible transfer speed of the interface.

However, utilizing SAS(commonly seen in Intel SSD RAIDs) or the more expensive NVMe M.2 SSD's, running on PCI-E lanes instead of SATAIII, you'll definitely see a difference on large file transfers, etc. (1000 MB/s +)

This is why the cheaper Samsung M.2 SATA SSD's will max at 550/520 MB/s and the more expensive Samsung PRO M.2 PCI-E X4 SSD's will transfer at least twice as fast. (1000 MB/s - 1500 MB/s). The M.2 Interface can utilize either PCI-E lanes or SATA lanes.


So pay attention when your purchasing that next M.2 ssd!!!

 
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