It's all theoretical at this point as I'm not building until the end of the year, so no doubt we'll see new toys hit the shops. Based on what's available now, I'm leaning towards the Corsair Extreme X64 SSD for my boot drive and scratch disks. However, I'm after some opinions on setup:
run a pair in RAID 0 and run OS, apps, pagefile and scratch disks from the RAID
or
or run them separately with OS and apps on one and pagefile and scratch on the other?
I know there's a lot of talk about the merits (or not) of the TRIM command and TRIM doesn't get passed through to RAID arrays, but in all honesty are we going to see much of a difference? My interpretation of all this from a limited understanding of SSDs is this:
If I run them individually, there's much more reading than writing going on, but conceivably the writing from scratch disks and OS temp files could in time cause the famous SSD performance hit. As a result TRIM will help out.
If I run a pair in RAID, I'm still doing the same amount of writing, but halving (in theory) all the operational times on the drives will negate any performance hit writing will cause, so TRIM won't be needed as much.
Methinks the choice of SSD is irrelevant as this is a question of implementing the technology, as opposed to brand merits.
As an aside, I'll be running W7 Ultimate 64 and have a pair of Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB also in a RAID 0 (HD video work y'see).
I look forward to comments.
Message edited by LePhuronn on 10-17-2009 at 03:16:00 PM
If it were me I'd initially set them up as discrete drives without RAID to see if the performance was adequate. If they perform well enough in that configuration, then I wouldn't have to worry about the added complications of dealing with RAID.
Cheers sminlal - that's what I'm leaning towards at the moment, although there is an extra thing I'm considering if I go the discrete drive route.
Basically if I run drives separately I probably won't need 64GB for the scratch disk. 30GB will do me fine, so I'd find myself looking at a read monster for OS and apps and a write monster for the scratch and pagefile. As a result I'm running different drives and my option to RAID no longer exists.
Perhaps I'm splitting hairs considering the original idea was to RAID 0 a pair of 150GB Velociraptors so whatever SSD route I take will crush them anyway!
Anybody else with an opinion?
Message edited by LePhuronn on 10-17-2009 at 03:17:06 PM