Raid 0 with Sandisk Ultra II SSDs

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Exonine

Exonine

Honorable
Feb 13, 2014
15
0
10,520
I've recently bought 2 Sandisk Ultra II 960GB SSDs and I'm planning to put them in raid 0 to get a bigger 1,92TB storage. I was wondering if there's anything I should do to assure myself they wont suffer from write amplification due to the raid 0 or if it's just like setting up 2 HDDs in raid 0.

Extra info: I'll be using the Z170 Deluxe mobo from ASUS with a i7 6700k and running it on windows 10.
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Exonine

Exonine

Honorable
Feb 13, 2014
15
0
10,520
More storage in a single place.
I don't really care about the speed gain, I just don't want to have all my programs separated in C: D: and so on. It wouldn't be practical to me. I do know the speed gain won't be noticeable and if one drive fails everything will be lost, but in a few year when a 2TB SSD will be cheaper I'll just replace my 2 SSDs. What I'm really concerned about is write amplification. If I get write amplification I won't RAID them.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
USAFRet

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Mar 16, 2013
171,630
18,007
184,590


TBW for current consumer grade SSD's is not really a concern. They will last years before that becomes an issue.
But the only thing you're really gaining is a single drive letter, as opposed to C and D.

Personally, I find it better to have the different drive letters, rather than stuffing everything into one.
 
Upvote 1 Downvote
Exonine

Exonine

Honorable
Feb 13, 2014
15
0
10,520
Well, I'm divided... Since your system is separated into multiple drives I would imagine you know quite a bit about it, so if you say it wouldn't be that much of an issue I don't really have a problem believing it. But it would still require me to actively balance my use on both SSDs so I don't end up with the main drive full and the second one half full since some programs would still need the main drive to store some of it's data regardless of it's location, but that's a bit of a stretch. On the other side, raid 0 would raise the risk of losing all my data.

Thank you very much!! I'm still unsure about what I'll be choosing to do, but you definitely helped !
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
USAFRet

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Mar 16, 2013
171,630
18,007
184,590
My current drives:
250GB Samsung 840 - boot OS, and applications
250GB Samsung 840 - photo work and Docs, etc
960GB Sandisk - games and other stuff
120GB Kingston - used to be boot drive, now just sitting there empty.

My music and video libs live on a whole different PC.

Putting everything into one drive letter has implications when/if you want to reinstall the OS.
Reinstall the OS, you'll have to reinstall the applications anyway. But all that other stuff...doc/music/games....if those live on a whole different drive, they are not affected at all.

As said...if the RAID thing goes south, all is lost. And if you need to reinstall the OS...it is MUCH harder if everything is in that same drive letter.
 
Upvote 1 Downvote
V

VanLazarus

Honorable
Oct 29, 2012
2
0
10,510
I'm trying to setup 4 Sandisk Ultra II 960gb drives in RAID 0. And yes, I do want them in RAID 0 for the massive read speed because I edit 6k video and want fast buffering of these large files. People insuating that SSDs in RAID have little advantage are incorrect. And yes, I'm aware that RAID 0 is fragile. I always have backups for all my data.

Unfortunately, I can't format this RAID 0 SSD partition. The Windows 10 Disk Manager just says that it's formatting the partition forever. When I reboot, the partition is RAW. I tried using the EASES Partion software and get the same result.

I deleted the raid (hardware Intel raid) and left them as individual drives. In windows I can format and use them individually to my heart's content, so the drives are good. But once I switch them back to one RAID 0 volume, I can't format.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what is wrong?

UPDATE: I found out that the trial Easus Partition software doesn't actually apply any changes to the partition. Once I used a free partition manager that actually executes commands, I was able to format without any problems. Still have no clue why Windows 10 Disk Manager couldn't format this SSD RAID 0 partition.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom