Two 500GB SSD'S or One 1TB SSD????

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Iver Hicarte

Iver Hicarte

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I will ask you guys a quick question. Is it better to get two units of an ssd with 500gb each or should I just get a single 1tb ssd??? Which will be more bang for your buck??? I want to save a lot of money as I can because I will be building a pc for my father! If I will be getting a single 1tb model of an ssd and just make 2 partitions in that ssd with 500gb each will that be a better option than just getting 2 units of an ssd with 500gb each?? or should I really get two separate drives with 500gb of them each??? Which is also better in performance two units of an ssd with 500gb each or a single unit with 1tb???

THANKS IN ADVANCE!!!
 
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DO NOT RAID 0 two consumer SSDs. First off you will gain minimal performance,

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485-13.html

Secondly and more importantly, if one drive fails the whole array fails, meaning you lose your data. Now you should be backing up your data anyway, but why is this risk even being taken for no benefit and and the chance of ruining a weekend re-doing your system.

RAID is for spinning metal drives, do not waste your time with it with an SSD.



As for the original question, why would you want to partition it into 2 drives? 1...
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Rookie_MIB

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Depends on the price you can get them for. If you can get two 500GB drives for less than the cost of a 1TB drive, then you can save some $$ by putting the two 500GB drives in a RAID0 at the BIOS level.

Next up, why would you repartition a 1TB drive into two 500GB drives? Just leave it at 1TB unless you have a specific need for it.

Performance wise, while twin 500GB drives might have a stitch more performance than a single 1TB drive (depending on the make and model of course), larger SSDs generally has better performance than smaller ones.

One thing I would definitely suggest - research the drives. These days some of the larger TLC drives are much slower than the MLC drives.
 
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Rogue Leader

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DO NOT RAID 0 two consumer SSDs. First off you will gain minimal performance,

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485-13.html

Secondly and more importantly, if one drive fails the whole array fails, meaning you lose your data. Now you should be backing up your data anyway, but why is this risk even being taken for no benefit and and the chance of ruining a weekend re-doing your system.

RAID is for spinning metal drives, do not waste your time with it with an SSD.



As for the original question, why would you want to partition it into 2 drives? 1 TB or 1 500GB drives given the same brand will perform nearly identically, get whatever is the better deal. They aren't like old hard drives data can be accessed from anywhere in the drive without slowing it down, so the benefit of having separate drives is nonexistent. Buy the best deal.
 
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Rookie_MIB

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If he has a single drive failure on his boot drive, he's still in the same predicament - as his entire boot drive is hosed and he'll be spending the weekend redoing his system. I've had exactly zero failures on any of my SSDs, some of which are used in regular desktops, some of which are used in my webservers and this is over a period of several years. Can they fail? Yes. I have yet to see one go down however.

RAID is for spinning metal drives, do not waste your time with it with an SSD.
Click to expand...

Huh? HDD's are far more prone to failure than SSDs, yet you suggest that he NOT put SSD's in RAID because of potential failure while then suggesting that RAID is for HDDs which are FAR more prone to that failure you were just talking about. Or - unless you're referring to the 'redundancy' part of RAID vs the performance increase...

Buy the best deal.
Click to expand...

Which is exactly what I advised him based on the pricing for the 1TB vs two 500GBs.
 
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Rogue Leader

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THe difference is the RAID 0 array can fail without the drive failing, but with the array out of sync and the data everywhere you aren't getting anything back. I've seen it happen. I've also seen SSDs fail, just difference in expereince. At least if an SSD fails on its own outside of an array theres a chance of data recovery, in the context of a RAID 0 array there is no chance.

As for why I say its for hard drives, hard drives are where there is a performance benefit. As per the article linked as well as many other studies done, it looks good in benchmarks but there is no benefit to real life useage. Instead you are introducing another avenue for possible failure and data loss. At least with hard drives you get the speed benefit.

Either way backups should be part of it. And yes I agree get the best deal, still don't know why he would want to partition the 1TB drive....
 
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Samer1970

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I used 2 SSD in Raid 0 from Day one of SSD in the market until the M2 NVME came and Raid 0 became not important (M2 NVME is 3 times faster like 3 2.5 SSD in raid 0)

not one of them failed not one , this thing of failing drives is rare . and always backup your important data ...


Every one I sold him a PC with 2x SSD in Raid 0 never complained as well for YEARS.

as a matter of fact many huge SSD PCIe cards are Raid 0 internally...


and I always saw performance gain , a huge gain , double , but that review link posted focus on start up and starting programs up gain , not loading huge files into programs which loads twice faster in Raid 0.

so yes the start up is the same , but loading huge data is not the same at all.

The secret behind the same start up time , is that programs are small , like 50-200 megabytes you will not feel the difference bacause they are small.

but loading files in x GB size will show huge gain in Raid 0.

@ OP .. get 2 drives is better , even if you dont want Raid , you will have 2 drives ...

here is what you gain from 2 drives :

1- The Data on a drive and the progs and OS on another .. here if you decide anytime to clean install windows and programs , you have the data on other SSD and no need to backup.

2- If you want to save an IMAGE of your System you can put the image file on the second SSD and when you recover you can use that image very fast to recover (faster than USB drive)

3- if one fails you have another , you wont wait till you buy another drive , your system will still work.


 
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