Can i use one SSD for my OS and another regualr sata drive?

[k1ngkev1n1]

if i only use one ssd drive for my OS and a sata drive will that be fine? or should i only use SSD drives?s

 

[geofelt]

That is a common and very good strategy.
Put your OS and highly used apps on the SSD, and get a second large conventional drive for storage and backups.

 

[k1ngkev1n1]

That is a common and very good strategy.
Put your OS and highly used apps on the SSD, and get a second large conventional drive for storage and backups.

what is this raid 0 if i get 2 i can do this? and how much faster is it?

 

[geofelt]

If you have to ask what raid-0 is, you don't need it.

Raid-0 uses two drives and combines them into a single image. The controller reads data alternately from each drive. This will improve throughput on sequential operations of large files. Synthetic benchmarks of raid-0 are impressive, but in the real world any significant performance difference is hard to detect.

You can do this with a ssd, but it is not worth it. A ssd that is twice as large will be able to read faster because it can read more internal blocks at a time. Sort of an internal raid-0.

Also, if your motherboard raid controller or one of the drives fail, you lose all your data.

 

[jim_l8472]

On another note, the current SSD's appeal is that it has zero seek time which gives you such quick access to data on the drive. RAID-0 has no affect on seek times, only throughput. So you would only see RAID-0 do it's job if you copied thousands of files to the drive all the time like a data server. Most people obviously don't do this, and why would you on such small drives.

P.S. I have a 30GB SSD as my system drive(Windows 7, all my games/apps) and I have a 1.5TB as my media drive(or anything I don't want to lose drive) I've always used a 2 drive setup like this so moving to SSD was perfect for me.

 

[jitpublisher]

People talk about RAID 0 and drive failures, controller failures, etc.
In my experience, the biggest cause of failure is by the person tinkering around. Adding or removing hardware, and inadvertently destroying or disabling the array. If you are self builder, and like to tinker, probably the biggest RAID 0 disaster occurs when they reset the BIOS for some reason, or update it. As all the RAID settings are disabled by default. As soon as they do this, they don't exactly realize what they just did that killed their array, and by the time they figure it out, they have messed with the drives too much to get the original array to re-establish.
But however it happens, RAID 0 is a sure fire way to lose everything you have if you don't back it up somewhere.