How important is RAISE in an SSD?

[metawin]

Hi, I am currently considering buy an OCZ Agility 3 60GB for my new build and the specs say that RAISE is not installed on this drive as to allow more room to be useable by the owner.

I understand that RAISE lets you recover from a failed NAND chip, but does it do anything else that would extend the life of the drive?

This drive comes with a 3 yr. warranty and I will be using disk image software to back up data so a NAND chip failure (which is very rare anyway from what I understand) is not that large of an concern to me.

So, would it make a huge difference in the life of the drive?

I know that 60GB is not big and will buy another to RAID when windows supports TRIM in RAID0, which I understand will be soon.

I was considering the Vertex 3 MAX IOPS but the performance of these two series of SSD's are identical except for very very large incompressible data transfers, which I will not be doing (who would?)

So is RAISE worth it?

 

[PhilFrisbie]

RAISE does not allow you to recover from a failed NAND chip, it reserves a portion of the NAND cells to be used to automatically replace bad cells as they are detected. The only advantage is that as cells go bad the capacity does not go down until all the reserved cells are used up.

 

[metawin]

Do you think bad cells would form on this drive anytime soon or would that be something to worry about in 1 or 2 yrs as I would probably upgrade before then

 

[mightymaxio]

Depends on how much throughput your going to be using, is this drive going to be the primary drive or for storage? The bad part about SSD's is that they have a limited number of writes. For 1 to 2 years i wouldn't worry about it although if your using this computer as a data server then i wouldn't use SSD's because of the write limitations.

 

[metawin]

It will be my primary drive for OS, anit-virus, rainmeter, games and apps with HDD for storage, RAID0 when TRIM is finally supported in a RAID.

Just my main PC, not a data server, I do use it allot though, mostly gaming, movies, study and office work, so it will get used daily for long periods.