Why RAID SSDs?

[r_manic]

Sorry for the noobish question, but this article:

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1139/1/

... where the reviewer builds a RAID 0 array from two SSDs to improve performance, got me thinking: is it really a good idea to RAID SSDs? From what I've read, SSDs are definitely faster, but at the cost of a shorter lifespan. With RAID 0 thrown into the mix, doesn't that make the chance of failure significantly higher than usual? And when you consider that the setup is for a boot drive, are we talking about a system that has a good chance of failing to boot?

 

[amnotanoobie]

I think the chance of failure is just like with hard drives. It is not impossible for a hard disk to suddenly go bad after a week or month of use.

Running RAID-0 has its risks, whether hard disk or SSD, and if you're running such a thing you're more concerned about performance rather than cost or reliability.

 

[Newf]

IMO, failure risk for either type of disk is quite low. It's the consequence of failure that hurts a bit.
If you do it right, a pair of SSDs in Raid 0 can bump against the bandwidth limits of the SATA interface. This is serious speed.
The main downside for me is the "geek" factor. I really don't want to do the manual weekly SSD maintenance needed to maintain factory fresh speeds.
A single drive with trim enabled firmware running AHCI mode on Win7 using M$oft chipset drivers makes life easy. This has only recently been available "out of the box" with no/little tinkering needed.

 

[sminlal]

Aside from manufacturing defects (bad solder joints, for example) or pretty extreme physical abuse, the biggest failure risk for an SSD is probably excessive writing. It's true that you can write faster to a RAID 0 volume, but since the writes are split between the two drives each drive is only getting half the number of writes - so they should actually last longer. And people use RAID 0 so the writes go faster, not because they want to do more of them...

 

[Pointertovoid]

You won't wear an SSD out. Just check the figures.