Best utiliization of my hard drives... RAID questions.

josh_teh_ahhsom

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Feb 9, 2015
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-I have a Corsair Force III 120GB SSD drive that my OS is installed on that has about 15GB of free space.
-I have a WD Blue 1TB HDD that I am not sure of brand but it is just for storage and installation of some basic software. I partitioned it into 4 drives just for organizational purposes. I don't really think it was necessary, but I did it when I knew a lot less about computers.
-I recently purchased a Samsung 256GB SSD that I load all resource intensive video games on that is filling up fast.
-I have a Seagate 500GB SSHD that was given to me that I install less resource intensive games on.
Those are all of the drives currently installed and in use.

I, now, have an additional Samsung 256GB SSD that was pulled from a computer that crapped out that I scored super-cheap. The SSD is perfectly fine. Also, I have a regular WD Blue 320GB HDD. Neither have been installed but I do know they are fully functional.

My question is... What is the best way to set all those drives up to get the best speed/performance? I was thinking about RAID0 on the two 256SSD drives and moving my OS there. Maybe purchasing a cheap (SanDisk Z400S 128GB SSD for $50) to RAID0 with my Force III SSD. I read some article about RAID0 on some SSDs and how it increased performance substantially for reads/writes up to a certain amount of drives. Anyway, I have all these dang drives and am not sure what the best way to configure them is. Also, keep in mind, if I change my OS to a different drive, I will have to do some sort of image backup, or whatever. I am somewhat savvy with computers, but would definitely need some guidance on how to do all of this. I just want to set everything up so it is as fast and efficient, as possible. Any ideas?
 
Solution
AOMEI Partition Assistant is a free tool for managing your partitions. It does have an option to combine multiple partitions, but I have never tired that feature. I am not sure exactly how it works or if there are risks (same file names on both drives). I have used the tool to move and resize partitions, it is a lot more powerful than the built-in Windows utility. You can tell its writers don't speak native English, the prompts can be funny, but its easy enough to use.

The same company also makes a product called AOMEI Backupper, which allows a partition to be cloned from one drive to another (even works for your boot partition).

sphbecker

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May 3, 2012
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While it is not a hard set requirement of RAID, you typically want to stick with drives that are the exact same model when you RAID. Minor differences in specs can hurt performance (by more than you gain) and in extreme cases, data corruption. Also, setting up SSDs in RAID 0 offers very little real world performance improvements (other than having all your space on a single drive).

In my opinion, RAID is a pain in the butt to deal with, and is not really worth it in most cases. Yes, you will have nicer looking benchmarks results, but you will not see your system running any faster. If your goal is a fast booting system that does gaming well, a single SSD is fine. While it may look messy, having each device show up as its own drive letter actually makes your system a lot easier to work on later down the road, and you sound like someone who likes making changes :)

If you keep the drives separate, then I suggest putting the OS and games on your best performing SSD, and putting the system page file on a separate device. If you record your gaming, then set the recording target to a different drive than the games are on. The idea is that you want to split up that 6.0gb/s per SATA as much as possible so you don't bottleneck a single channel.
 

josh_teh_ahhsom

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Feb 9, 2015
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I thought that was probably the case, but I wasn't sure. I just have all these drives just plugged in and was thinking "there must be a better way." My computer runs very fast, now. I have Windows 10 and boot times are super-fast. Resource intensive games load and run very well that I have loaded on my SSD. I just assumed there would be a better way to do things instead of just plugging everything in a sata port and rolling with it.

I am definitely a person that likes to make changes... whether they are terribly God-awful changes the jack stuff up or just general tinkering that sometimes help. What would've been ideal would've been to pick specific parts all picked out when I built the computer and done everything "right" from the beginning. I built the computer in 2011 with a hodge-podge of gear I mostly got for free. A nice EVGA motherboard with an i7 960 that was used in a server that the company I worked for was going to throw away... no idea why. The Force III SSD i picked up on a sale at Fry's. The 1TB drive was free, also. I got all sorts of random stuff. The computer is still running like a beast even with the first gen i7. I have 12GB G Skill Ripjaw RAM, and recently replaced my 560ti SLI setup with a GTX 970. Just wanted to make sure there wasn't something I could do better with all the hard drives I have. Now, I am wondering if it is necessary to have 4 partitions on my 1TB drive. Two probably would've been fine, I suppose... I don't really know how to delete those partitions without moving all of the data off of them and shrinking the drive and recreating 2 larger partitions. Thanks for the reply!
 

sphbecker

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May 3, 2012
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AOMEI Partition Assistant is a free tool for managing your partitions. It does have an option to combine multiple partitions, but I have never tired that feature. I am not sure exactly how it works or if there are risks (same file names on both drives). I have used the tool to move and resize partitions, it is a lot more powerful than the built-in Windows utility. You can tell its writers don't speak native English, the prompts can be funny, but its easy enough to use.

The same company also makes a product called AOMEI Backupper, which allows a partition to be cloned from one drive to another (even works for your boot partition).
 
Solution

josh_teh_ahhsom

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Feb 9, 2015
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Thanks so much for the help... So, could i theoretically, make an image of everything I have on one big drive then load it all back how I wanted it betwixt the several drives I do have? I'd really like to have more than 120GB SSD for my OS and I got one partition 250GBish of the 1TB HDD that is almost completely full due to Windows bullsh*t backup system. I specifically told it to only use a certain amount of data and it used more, anyway. But I digress... I just want things more organized and I have 4 drives in use 120GB SSD for OS, 1TB HDD for storage, 256 SSD for game installes, and 500GB SSHD for slightly less demanding games... And, now I have another 256GB SSD along with a 320GB HDD not installed. I need to install the 320 to move the backups there, at the very least. I'm gonna run out of sata ports before too long. I suppose I could get a PCIe slot with SATA ports. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Any more ideas, just let me know. Thanks, again!!!