Beginner: Can I raid 0 two 120gb SSD and then have extra storage?

airconductor

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Jul 15, 2011
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Hello, this is my first time building a pc from scratch. I keep reading the performance boost by putting SSD's in Raid 0. The problem is with the price of high capacity SSDs. So my question is can i put two 120gb 6gb/s SSDs in Raid-0 and then have more storage space in the form of HDDs?(not necessarily in Raid)
 
Solution
Yes, but you shouldn't do the RAID part.

It's current best-practice to install your OS and programs on the SSD, which gives snappier startup and application loading, and then have HDDs for large amounts of data where the access and transfer speeds are less critical. That's the "Yes" part of my answer.

The "No" part of my answer is that SSDs should not be RAIDed with the current state of software, controllers, and firmware. The current wisdom (and I have been contradicted once on this, just this week, so maybe things are changing) is that A) Using RAID breaks the use of the TRIM command, so drive performance will degrade over time, and B) The SSD manufacturers build larger drives in the same series with more memory channels, so...
Yes, but you shouldn't do the RAID part.

It's current best-practice to install your OS and programs on the SSD, which gives snappier startup and application loading, and then have HDDs for large amounts of data where the access and transfer speeds are less critical. That's the "Yes" part of my answer.

The "No" part of my answer is that SSDs should not be RAIDed with the current state of software, controllers, and firmware. The current wisdom (and I have been contradicted once on this, just this week, so maybe things are changing) is that A) Using RAID breaks the use of the TRIM command, so drive performance will degrade over time, and B) The SSD manufacturers build larger drives in the same series with more memory channels, so effectively by buying a drive twice the size you get performance like RAID0 implemented in the hardware.

So, if you want 240 GB of SSD (that's a lot), buy one 240 GB SSD and not two for RAID0.

I'll look for the thread in which a contrary opinion was presented.

Edit: Here it is: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum2.php?config=tomshardwareus.inc&cat=32&post=271117&page=1&p=1&sondage=0&owntopic=1&trash=0&trash_post=0&print=0&numreponse=0&quote_only=0&new=0&nojs=0

Since the common practice is to put the OS on the SSD, how big are your OS plus your combined applications? I've got a 128 GB SSD with my system on it, and there is a _lot_ of free space. I'm trying to figure out what part of my data I could benefit from having on the SSD.
 
Solution

groberts101

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Feb 20, 2010
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you'll never doubt R0's capabilities if you had 2 x 120GB SSD's combined with 4 HDD in R0. Bigger question is if you would even need that much speed and are willing to spend to get it.

Lack of trim capability can easily be worked around through dedicated idle time for garbage collection to clean things up. Trim is not mandatory for the newest frimware to figure out what nand can be cleaned/returned. It's just another method to speed up the process for on the fly recovery.