Sata 6Gb/s RAID or SSD

[fredthebest2003]

Ok so i have a P7P55D motherboard which has SATA 2.0 3gb/s ports, but ive just seen these new Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB SATA 3 drives and im thinking i will RAID 0 two of them to get best speed etc.

ive seen i can buy an Asus U3S6 add on PCIe card which has 2 usb 3 ports and 2 sata 6gb/s ports, however it doesnt say anything about RAID for this add on card....

my question is, can i buy the card, and have the new Hard drives plugged in to it, and be able to RAID them using the RAID controller on my motherboard? or would it not recognise....

my other dilemma is should i just not get these drives and buy an SSD...... my only problem with that is i only have enough money to buy a really cheap nasty SSD like a kingston SSD now or something....

thanks

 

[gtvr]

I'm 99% certain the RAID controller on your MB will only control drives plugged in to the SATA ports on your motherboard.

What are you trying to accomplish? That will help guide some answers. What is too slow for you, or is this just to be "faster"? SSD vs. RAID will have different benefits for different tasks.

 

[fredthebest2003]

At the minute my performance bottleneck is my hard drive. i would like my system to run faster and applications to load faster etc.. however whats putting me off an SSD is the lack of storage space for loads of applications. i would have a separate storage drive for media etc. if i got an SSD its just im worried about filling up the SSD

 

[EXT64]

Well, you could keep a secondary mechanical drive for storage and programs that don't need the speed, and reserve the SSD for only the OS and HDD intense programs.

 

[fredthebest2003]

hadnt though of putting some programs on the HDD... thanks for that ..... might go for an intel X25-V 40gb drive ...

 

[sminlal]

You need to understand the limitations of hard drives.

According to the Western Digital specification sheet for the 640GB Caviar Black, these drives have a maximum sustained transfer rate of 113MByte/sec.

A 6Gbit/sec SATA port (600MByte/sec) isn't going to give you any better performance than a 3Gbit/sec (300MByte/sec) port. In fact these drives don't even saturate a 1.5GBit/sec SATA port.

So just go ahead and plug them into your motherboard, you won't loose any performance.

SSDs would be much, much faster. Their big advantage is that they have access times that are around 100X faster than a hard drive. And RAID doesn't improve access times.