Crucial SSD vs. 2 PNY's RAID 0, a few questions

jonesmalaco · Jan 19, 2016

OK, I've always had this 250GB Crucial SSD. Very reliable, no complaints about it. Unless that it ran out of space, so I needed another. Found a PNY at BestBuy while vacationing in the US (I live abroad) on Black Friday, and since it was cheap enough, I got 2 of those, 480GB each. Never heard of the brand, but since it was the only one available I thought, what the heck.

At first I did the RAID 0 in the BIOS. Then installed Windows. I noticed that the boot time in the RAID 0 PNY's were slower than on my regular Crucial SSD (obviously both are the same version of Windows). That wasn't working out (I was having trouble with the operating system on the PNY's, my fault, nothing to do with the RAID 0), so I scrapped it. Started again using the BIOS to set up the RAID 0, used "Disk Management" to set it up inside Windows, and installed a game on the PNY's to test it out (using the Crucial as the operating system). Saw no difference in the loading times. So I did the RAID 0 again, this time through the "Disk Management" only (No BIOS), making a "stripped" volume (which I guess it's the same thing?). Same results. No apparent improvement in the loading times of the same game. Although benchmarking (used AS SSD and Bench32 softwares) on the RAID 0 PNY's show read speeds around 750 - 800 MB/S, against 350 - 400 MB/s of the Crucial drive, I see no apparent difference in loading times.

Just out of curiosity, one of the benchmarks (UserBenchmark Software) say "RAM cached drive detected" on one of the PNY's. Have no idea what it means, if someone can clarify it...

Again, I'll use it mostly for gaming. But as I said, I saw no difference from the RAID 0 vs. SSD. Is it because the PNY SSD's are unreliable (at least when comparing them with the Crucial). Have I done something wrong when setting up the RAID 0? Or is it all just normal and I'm not supposed to see (and probably won't) see a difference when it comes to game loading speeds?

drtweak · Jan 20, 2016

RAIDing SSD's for speed isn't as great of an idea. Few reason.

1) there is no AHCI for SSD's which can slow the SSD down.

2) There is no TRIM support for SSD"s unless it is a RAID 1 and even then it depends on the SSD's and Contollers. By not having trim enabled you put more wear and tear on the SSD.

RAID 0 two ssd's together will give you better speed yes, but beyond that you don't get as much unless you are using a very good RAID controller and good SSD's. i have seen a RAID 5 of 24 SSD's push over 5 Gigabytes a second but again a lot was setup and it wasn't a cheap build.

As for game load times it depends on what games you are playing. not all games are super huge. If it has to load a 100MB file to play the game and even though the speed is twice as fast it takes 1/3 of a second to load the game. on something twice as fast it would then be 1/6th. Can you tell the difference between 1/6th of a second and 1/3? I can't. Unless it was a HUG game loading like a 1GB file then yes you would see a difference as one game would then take 2-3 second and the other 1 second.

All in all it comes down to does 1-2 seconds really matter that much? more than likely no. RAID SSD's in 0 is like someone in traffic trying to pass 2-3 cars. all in all in the end it still takes them just as much time as they were 2 card back.

I would just break the RAID and use all your drives independantly. The only reason to RAID 0 is if you had the drives and needed the space or had two drives dirty cheap. most of the time the cost of buying two SSD's and RAID 0ing them is more costly than just buying a single drive that is double its size.

jonesmalaco · Jan 21, 2016

Thanks for the heads up mate! Yeah, after experimenting I have seen that it doesn't make a total difference for so called "Triple A" games. Tested with Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed Syndicate. As I've read somewhere else, one need a stopwatch to see the difference in loading times (as you precisely said it, it's only about 2 or 3 seconds). I've read that in games like a heavy modded Skyrim (don't know the reason, maybe because it's sequentially read?) it makes a difference. Will still test it with maybe GTA V, but again, I doubt it would make a huge difference.

I've heard that 24 (in the version I've heard it were 23

) SSD's in RAID 0. Yeah, you gotta have a lot of money to spare to go that way. Not my case.
Thanks again mate!!

drtweak · Jan 21, 2016

Yea few links on that but again remember they have REAL RAID CONTROLLERS not this onboard RAID crap that most people try to use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgJUKkOWR4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eULFf6F5Ri8 - this one is pretty old
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2prqrn - This is the one I was talking about. they actually do two RAID 5's on two different cards and then make a Software RAID 0. This thing is with SSD's running 24 of them on a single RAID card can max out its bandwith though so having two RAID cards and then doing the software RAID you get more speed.

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Crucial SSD vs. 2 PNY's RAID 0, a few questions

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