Are SSDs in raid-0 still relevant?

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mathieuturcottetech

Jun 18, 2018
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Long story short, I'm starting to need more space on my machine. I'm a gamer, and I cam'T stand long loading screens. With SSDs becoming more and more affoardable, I'm thinking about adding a big SSD to offload my games on. Essentially, I have a small SSD for my OS, and a 7200rpm hdd for my games and data. That disk is getting full.

I checked on amazon.ca, and I found a 500gb WD ssd for 150$. I also found a 240gb WD SSD for 75$. The hamster started to go... What if I was gonna get two of those? would cost me the same (150$), but I would have 2x 240gb in raid 0. So almost the same capacity(480 vs 500), but I would have two disks in Raid-0 instead of a single one.

I do understand the risks of a drive failure in a raid-0 configuration. I do not care in the slightest. I would put Steam, Origin and Blizzard games on there... nothing I can'T simply reinstall in minutes. I also have pretty fast unlimited internet. I don't care having to download everything again. The only things I care about are capacity and performance. This would also means that if I have a drive failure, I have only a 75$ drive to replace, instead of a 150$ drive to replace. Altough the chances of a failure would be greater. I have been using SSDs for the last 6 years and never had any problems, so this is an increased risk I can easily live with.

As an example of a game, I'm a huge fan of flight simulators. I play a ton of X-Plane 11. it takes forever to load from the HDD. I made space on the OS ssd yesterday and transfered the game on it. The loading times were substantially better, and thats on a SSD that is also used by the system, and it's not in a raid configuration. I can only imagine I would have even more gains on a raid-0 array, on disks that are dedicated to running the games.

What is your opinions on this?

Thanks!
 
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mdd1963

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Once you are using a modern SATA SSD, not much time is shaved off of typical game loading level times by going to 2 or more SSDs, or even NVME M.2 drives, frankly....

If you believe you routinely play games that are the odd exception, that is indeed entirely possible...

I'd still recommend simply getting the single 500 GB SSD you wish to start with, either Samsung 860 EVO or Corsair MX500. (Motherboard chipset RAID 0 is not the pinnacle of reliability, and you are far more likely to suffer glitch failures in the RAID than to suffer an actual SSD failure; Samsungs have at least a 3 year warranty anyway)
 
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jdlech2

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I didn't build my system for any particular use or app. I built it to see that I could - like climbing a mountain to see if you could.
I use 4 KingDian S280-240GB SSDs in a RAID 0 on a Maximus VIII board.
I chose those drives because they had a very good price/performance/capacity.
Here's what Sandra has to say:
http://ranker.sisoftware.net/show_run.php?q=c2ffcef8debfdee3d0e4dce8dee7c1b38ebe98fd98a595b3c0fdcd

I'm waiting for the inevitable - someone out there is going to produce a motherboard capable of a 4 drive NVMe raid 0. Why? Purely because they can.

Needless to say, I wait for nothing to load. It's really spoiled me.
 
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mdd1963

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Quite a few were displaying forthcoming 4-way add-in cards for a PCI-e x16 slot at Computex......(9,000+ MB/sec reads?)

At least a few X99 mainboards were running 3 way RAID 0 w/ 950 Pros about 2-3 years ago....; an OC'd 6950 was cranking out like near 1,000,000 IOPS,. etc....



 
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jdlech2

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I'm sure you're aware that the I in RAID stands for 'inexpensive'. At least it's supposed to. ;) I've seen NVMe drives costing over a thousand bucks each, and I wonder why anyone would pay that much. I bought my 240gb SSDs on sale for just over $42 each. So my 4 drive RAID is just under 1TB. Comparatively, my read speed is slower while my write speed is faster than one NVMe drive. But here's the kicker. In raw speed, I give the edge to an NVMe drive - but only a slight edge. My RAID is slightly cheaper than 1 NVMe - making up the difference. But.... I've got almost 4X the capacity.
Now, if you want to create a RAID of 2 or 4 NVMe drives, you can match my capacity and totally blow away my SSD raid. But it's going to cost you over 4X more $$.
And again, I agree that there's no reason to bother building a 2 drive RAID for mechanical or SSDs. To get any real benefit, you need to go with 4 or more drives. I'm tempted to add two more drives to my raid. But I've already proven to myself that I can build and maintain it. I have no need except to play with the benchmarks.
And I just don't see the merit in building a RARED. (Redundant Array of Really Expensive Drives). lol
 
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jdlech2

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So you think that even a 50 drive SSD RAID "has no real user benefit" over a single SSD or NVMe.
Nice to know how crazy your are.
By that logic, there's no real user benefit of more modern CPUs over a single core celeron.
Because nobody benefits from better performance. Anything faster is just a waste of money. /sarcasm
 
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USAFRet

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"50 drive"?
Well....if we wish to go into the realm of ridiculous, sure. That would be "faster".
Giving up IOPS, but much, much faster throughput. Not 50x faster, though.

And of course, all the other infrastructure needed to go to that level of stupid.

Even a 2 or 3 drive SSD RAID can be "faster". In some limited use cases. And again, probably giving up IOPS over a single drive.

Not sure what you're trying to prove here.
 
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Actually if you'd read up a bit into something like Optane you'd realize Windows isn't capable of using speeds like that. Something that's also being approached with the latest NVMe drives. So yes, faster is a waste of money. I have a single ~$300 512GB 950 Pro as my C drive. I guarantee it's faster where it counts ( deep queue ) than any 50 disk RAID you can throw together without buying a multi thousand dollar controller.
 
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jdlech2

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0qtu5NXhuQ
Just jump to 4:20.
His problem is that he's using software RAID to tie his other RAIDs together. Software RAID has always been vastly slower than hardware.

The point I'm making is, nothing about drive performance is going to be absolute. NVMe is not always going to faster than RAID. SSD is not always going to be faster than mechanical drive RAID. Especially considering there are scores... SCORES of SSDs with really terrible throughput. Like under 200MB/s sequential read terrible.
This little "gem" in particular
http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/6170/TOSHIBA-THNS128GE8BBDC
Avg. Sequential Write Speed 31MB/s
Of course, that's the worst SSD I could find in under a minute, lol.

So when someone says "RAIDs were never relevant", or "RAIDs are worthless" or anything to that effect, they're stating an opinion that is simply not supported by anything but 2 drive or software raid reviews and don't take hardware into consideration. It's one of those statements that is easily proven wrong.
And quite frankly, why you guys even bother with anything more than a 286 is beyond me, given the "speed means nothing" opinions expressed here.

So, your 950 Pro can beat this:
https://youtu.be/eULFf6F5Ri8
Edit: My 960GB, 4 drive RAID only nets 1757.54MB/s . But then it only cost me all of $200 with cables included. How much did your 950 pro cost for almost half the capacity?
 
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USAFRet

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Of COURSE speeds improve as technology changes. Nature of the beast.
So far...SATA III SSD + RAID 0 gives little relevant user facing benefit.

Benchmarks may show huge numbers. So what. Neither you nor I use benchmarks. We use applications and files.

Using bottom of the barrel crappy drives as your reference point? Why would you do that?
Of COURSE there are cheap crappy SSDs. A 10 year old SATA II SSD that was poor to begin with is irrelevant.
Your point?
(I'll refrain from stating my viewpoint on using userbenchmark.com as a trusted source, but let's move on)

Does a particular application or file open faster in a single SSD vs 2x (or 50x) SSD RAID 0?
Can you save faster?

2 RAID arrays, SSD or otherwise, talking to each other, can indeed be faster. Who does that outside of production houses?

I am absolutely open to changing my opinion.
Show us your actual results. I await your individual testing.
 
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RAID only increases bandwidth. It does not improve latency. In fact if anything adding the RAID controller slightly increases latency. Sequential speeds are the least impressive thing about SSDs. 4K random read doesn't scale at all with RAID and that IS the most impressive thing about an SSD. You want fast get NVMe or Optane.

If RAID SSDs improved anything they'd be standard on all OEMs marketed as "gaming".
 
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jdlech2

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Using bottom of the barrel crappy drives as your reference point?
Click to expand...
That's just what I could find in under a minute. And that web site lists scores of crappy SSDs. No it's not a reference point - it's an example. An example that proves not all SSDs are high performance.
It's also my opinion that not all NVMe drives are worth the money.
Example of this is the Samsung SM951
Sure it's faster, but just a bit over half the capacity, and only 20% faster... for 2.5X the price. Not worth it, imho.
Even the 950 pro 512Gb is still $70 more than my RAID for 85% less capacity (but 20% more speed).
I like my choices and am only dissing your choices because I feel insulted. There's really nothing wrong with your choices. But there's nothing wrong with mine.
But now I'm starting to wonder. I bought 6 of my SSDs; 2 as replacements when one in my RAID dies. I didn't want to find out an exact replacement was no longer available years after building the RAID. I'm now wondering how a 6 SSD hardware RAID would compared to the 950 Pro - never mind the capacity difference.

It would be a lot of bother for me. My RAID is my boot and OS drive. I would have to blow it up and restore from my backup. And I'm pretty sure my Maximus Hero VIII can't do it a 6 drive RAID (and I sure as heck wouldn't doing via software). I would have to buy a separate controller card, so it would be an extra $100 or so, and that makes the whole experiment not worth it.
But still, I wonder.
 
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J_E_D_70

J_E_D_70

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No one in this thread said is blanket irrelevant - there are edge cases (specific professional apps) that might benefit where time is money.

Even going from a good SATA III to an NVMe was barely faster... because SSDs are already insanely fast. This isn’t theoretical, I just did it. A 4-second level load decreasing to a 3-second time. Woohoo...

Building arrays to game is pointless.
 
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jdlech2

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4K random read doesn't scale at all with RAID and that IS the most impressive thing about an SSD. You want fast get NVMe or Optane
Click to expand...
You have a good point there. But then, you're willing to pay roughly 2.5X more money and sacrifice almost half the capacity for that performance. I think that's just throwing money at it.

I think I'll be looking for a 4 or 6 drive NVMe RAID native onboard for my next motherboard. But by then, maybe Intel will have eliminated the need for secondary storage altogether; something they keep saying they're working on.
Building arrays to game is pointless.
Click to expand...
Then don't build them for gaming. I hardly game at all. My heaviest graphic games are Stellaris and Cities-Skylines. Hardly heavy gaming stuff.
As I mentioned earlier - I didn't build a RAID for any particular reason other than to see that I could. In my 20s I used to build machines. Then I spent a good 20 years away from them. When I retired, I decided to see what I could do. That was my main motivation - so just sticking a $250 stick on a motherboard did not appeal to me. I wanted to build something.
Same reason why a guy might tear a perfectly good car engine down and rebuild it. If he wanted a better engine, all he had to do was order the car with a better one from the factory. And the highway speed limit is still the same whether he bought it or rebuilt it. That's not the point of his decision - not the point at all.
 
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clarkjd

clarkjd

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You are positioning your special case RAID(with EXTREMELY inexpensive components that probably can't be duplicated) against a single drive system (that anyone can get). I agree that in your special case, you have a winner! However how is that relevant to the rest of the real world when no one can duplicate it? You even state that you bought extra SSDs just in case your particular SSDs aren't available in the future!

 
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jdlech2

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your special case
Click to expand...
Actually, I got lucky. They just so happened to be on sale. And even then, KingDian raised their prices across the board since then.
But a fella could do even better, if he's careful about read/write speeds and look for sales. I've noticed prices in general have increases these past couple of years. Even so, $60 can still get you a really nice SSD upon which to build a RAID. So $250 can still net a real nice 1TB RAID. At which point, it's really a decision between speed (NVMe) or capacity (RAID) for the same price. Double the cost, and you can have both.

A good for instance is Crucial CT250MX500SSD1 SSD. If I were to build a 4 drive SSD RAID, I would want to use it. But I would also want to wait for a sale.

And I've gone over 2 years without a drive failure. And I backup wholly automatically - whole thing, boot sectors, partitioning, all of it - once a week at 2am every Sunday night. Rescue disk and 2 replacement SSDs waiting for that day (knock on wood). I'm not worried.
Besides, NVMe is about as likely to fail. Same technology, same usage. Remember that each drive in a 4 drive RAID gets only 1/4 the traffic.

Even so, I'm only using logic instead of field tests. I wish this guy
https://smcleod.net/tech/2018/03/20/oss-flash-storage-update.html
Had 200+ NVMes to report on. And in 2 years, he has had 4 SSD failures out of 208 (I'm not counting the one dead out of the box). That's a failure rate of 1% per year over the course of 2 years. Not exactly enterprise HDD rates, but certainly not the horror movie we've been led to believe. It will be interesting to see an update at 4 and 6 years.
 
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Ralston18

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My take is a twist on Occam's Razor.

Single, fast, inexpensive SSD drive that is slightly slower versus a multi-drive, slightly faster, and more expensive RAID setup....

With the latter possibly becoming moot when the necessary SSDs are gone.

No problem per se with experimental or test setups. However, the SSD RAID setup under discussion is not at all practical for me.

Expensive, cumbersome, more chance for failures, and probably overall difficult to maintain.

Interesting discussion anyway....






 
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USAFRet

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SATA III SSD + RAID 0 vs single SSD.
cpPoe5P.png

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485-12.html

(NVMe is not part of the equation here)
 
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jdlech2

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2X RAID 0
Click to expand...
Why bother? 2x raids are worthless, imho. If it's not stripped over 3X or more, you get practically zero benefit - as the graphic shows. May as well show us software RAID performance. Why show us "nerfed" drives?
Now show us performance of 4x 128GB SSDs. Or to keep the price somewhat equal, 4X 100GB SSDs? (fixed costs are a b**** when it comes to really small drives).
My point is: don't even bother showing me 2 drive raid performance - we ALL know it sucks.
Edit:
...versus a multi-drive, slightly faster, and more expensive RAID setup
Click to expand...
Which is another point I concede - the fixed cost of each is multiplied by the number of drives. This is partly why RAIDS tend to have large capacities. It's the economics. I really don't need a TB boot/OS drive. Who does? But it was the right compromise for me between the fixed cost of each drive and capacity. Half capacity drives would not have been half price, as we all know. But also double capacity drives would not have been double price either. But who needs a 2TB boot/OS drive?
Although I admit to having a 6TB data HDD with 5TB sitting on it atm. That's somewhat extreme, but I dl a lot of movies and shows and don't burn them to disk until the drive is about to blow up. If I need to convert video formats, I use my raid for that.
Tl;Dr, RAIDs do suffer from the fixed cost of each drive in the array.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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The point is, RAID 0 with 2x drives (HDD) did NOT suck. It was a significant performance increase if you cared to go down that road.
People then think that automagically carries over into SSD's.
It doesn't. I wish it did...I'd be all over that.

I'm fully prepared to cross the line, if user facing results prove to be significantly better.
I await your performance testing results with and without multi SSD RAID 0.
 
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jdlech2

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Hmm. I think I could do that. I have replacement SSDs just sitting on a shelf. I could disable my RAID, throw one unused SSD in, restore my OS to it, then benchmark it "ceteris paribus". So we can see the difference between 1 SSD and a 4X SSD RAID.
It won't be this weekend, but I'll post results.
 
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