4xSSD's in RAID0

ImperialistMillitant · Oct 5, 2015

Hello

I want to reduce game load times by several magnitudes. When I played Oblivion on my machine on the Caviar Black, I get stutter which I can only assume is from the HDD having to load the world as I fly.
NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT! I will NOT tolerate this!
Therefore an SSD will probably make this possible but I want MORE speed. I was thinking of four 256GB SSD's with an Adaptec 2271700-R 6405E controller.

I understand the risks associated with RAID0.

USAFRet · Oct 5, 2015

SSD + RAID 0: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

DeadlyDays · Oct 5, 2015

exactly the graph above, RAID for SSD's is pointless.

Instead for more speed opt for a PCI based SSD with higher speeds if SATA 3 bandwidth is too low for your tastes.

rgd1101 · Oct 5, 2015

This is much better if you can afford it.
http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/intel-dc-p3608-ssd-enterprise,1-2907.html

crisan_tiberiu · Oct 5, 2015

Instead of putting 4 SSDs in RAID 0 for "gazillions" of performance, rather buy a PCI-E SSD

. RAID 0 does not have the same impact on SSDs as on HDDs.

ImperialistMillitant · Oct 5, 2015

rgd1101 :

Im not willing to spend that much even if I could afford it.
The Intel PCI SSD's are extortionate and I would rather go on holiday or buy a car.
The Intel 750 Series is affordable (400GB) however I am not blown away by it. There must be a solution short of a RAMdisk.
I was looking at the Plextor PX-128M6E-BK but read is only marginally faster than a SATA SSD.

rgd1101 · Oct 5, 2015

Get a PCIe interface SSD, either the m.2 or pcie adapter.
like
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-950-pro-ssd-nvme-3d-vnand,30135.html

USAFRet · Oct 5, 2015

ImperialistMillitant :

There is no magic bullet.
Currently, you have a WD Black HDD. Any current consumer grade SSD will be magnitudes faster, in the realm you are speaking of...game load times.
Stacking SSD's in RAID 0 brings zero further benefit.

As far as extortionate prices? Go back a few years and see what regular SSD's were selling for.
A 500GB SSD was similar to a used car.
PCI-E SSD prices will come down the same way. Eventually.

ImperialistMillitant · Oct 5, 2015

I like the answers so far, the PCI SSD's with 2000Mbs is what I am looking for. I assume I will only need a PCI adapter card which are plentiful?

Is there any know method of putting two PCI SSD's in RAID0? Or would that be ineffective as well?

Solandri · Oct 5, 2015

ImperialistMillitant :

Don't focus on the sequential speeds. Except for a few specific tasks (real-time video editing, copying large movie files from one SSD to another SSD), sequential transfer speeds are mostly irrelevant because the computer almost never needs to read/write that large amount of data that quickly.

The vast majority of the speedup from a SSD comes from its 4k read/write speeds. A decent HDD gets about 150 MB/s sequential speeds, so a SATA 3 SSD is less than 4x faster. Why then does a SSD feel so much faster? A decent HDD gets about 1.5 MB/s 4k speeds, while a SSD can hit 30-70 MB/s. That's about 20-45x faster. If you can take advantage of NCQ, the SSD can be hundreds of times faster than a hard drive at 4k read/writes.

The spec which most closely correlates to 4k speeds is IOPS. That's what you should be focusing on, not sequential speeds.

DeadlyDays :

RAID-0ing SSDs doesn't help because the smallest read/write chunk is still 4k. If you RAID-0 four SSDs, then the 4k file gets broken up into four 1k chunks, and each SSD still has to read/write a 4k chunk (which contains 1k of data). In other words, the IOPS (input/output operations per second) remains the same for 4k read/writes. RAID-0 doesn't improve IOPS, so there's zero speed improvement. In fact it'll be slower than a single SSD because of the extra overhead of RAID-0.

The IOPS for most PCIe SSDs is the same as for SATA 3 SSDs - around 90k to 120k IOPS. In fact 120k IOPS isn't enough to even saturate SATA 3 at 4k read/writes (it's about 480 MB/s, and can only be approached with NCQ since the data request from the PC is slower than the data retrieval).

The newer NVMe SSDs are the first ones I've seen in a long time which significantly improve IOPS. So getting a PCIe SSD isn't enough. You need to get one with better IOPS, which probably means a NVMe SSD.

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4xSSD's in RAID0

ImperialistMillitant

Honorable

USAFRet

Titan

DeadlyDays

Honorable

rgd1101

Don't

crisan_tiberiu

Distinguished

ImperialistMillitant

Honorable

rgd1101

Don't

USAFRet

Titan

ImperialistMillitant

Honorable

Solandri

Illustrious

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