ASUS Z97-AR, SSD RAID Array - Read/Write Speed Gains Worth The Trouble?

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rargent

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I am looking into setting up a RAID array on a new home PC build. I have looked into some configurations and was interested in RAID5 config because I can do it on only 3 drives. Also heard that RAID10 (or 0+1) are excellent choices combining speed gains and data protection.

Are the gains of speed worth the expense of extra drives and setup time, or does it only provide a marginal gain over traditional single drive SSD?

Also, I heard somewhere that there are newer RAID controllers that are capable of creating an array using SSD/HDD, where they designate "hot data" and distribute writing to drives specifically.
Can anyone tell me more about this?
 
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RAID Arrays are almost never worth it for general purpose use. If you have some very specific use for it where single drive just won't do then it might make sense. You can use Intel SRT or other caching software to have an SSD act like a cache to a spinning disk and that solution works well to keep your machine responsive on your most used data.

Some examples of RAID array usage would be for making a large data storage single drive that can survive a drive failure, a high speed array for burst transfers (like recording or processing raw video streams for instance), a production machine that you just don't want any down time due to a drive failure.

If you just want to make your boot times quicker and your games faster a better idea is...
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Traciatim

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RAID Arrays are almost never worth it for general purpose use. If you have some very specific use for it where single drive just won't do then it might make sense. You can use Intel SRT or other caching software to have an SSD act like a cache to a spinning disk and that solution works well to keep your machine responsive on your most used data.

Some examples of RAID array usage would be for making a large data storage single drive that can survive a drive failure, a high speed array for burst transfers (like recording or processing raw video streams for instance), a production machine that you just don't want any down time due to a drive failure.

If you just want to make your boot times quicker and your games faster a better idea is just to keep your game and OS/Applications on separate drives. You probably wouldn't notice much of a change between a single drive and an array in most cases anyway. They benchmark really well, but in real world tests the difference is almost always negligible except for a few very specific use cases.


 
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Quixit

Quixit

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In normal home use, you primarily want low latency. All types of RAID increase your latency and to minimize this you'd want to buy a hardware RAID controller, which can be fairly expensive. One thing you definitely do not want to do is to run RAID5 on a software RAID device because it severely reduces performance, while also being rather prone to errors.

Currently the generally held opinion is just to buy one good-quality SSD as large as you need. That will offer the best latency and very good throughput, in fact current high-end PCI-E SSDs are so fast that most other parts of the computer cannot keep up. For best performance you might want to consider buying a Intel 750 series SSD, which have a 2200MB/s max read speed, much faster than anything SATA. Samsung offers a similar drive but only to OEM customers. For a SATA SSD, which are limited by SATA to about 550MB/s I generally recommend the Samsung 850 Pro or if you want to save a bit of money at the expense of a fairly small amount of performance the Samsung 850 EVO.
 
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