Should I upgrade to Raid0?

[ares640]

I just bought a new gaming rig, and unfortunately I did not consider RAID0 when I was building it. It has not arrived yet, so there is still time to express ship parts.

What I want to know is, how much of a general and gaming performance will I see if I buy a second HDD and RAID0 it? I am using a SSD for OS and important games, the HDD will be used for mass storage and games I do not play as often. Specs:

i5 2500k
MSI Z68A-GD55
MSI GTX 570 Twin Frozr III
8 GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 Mhz

Crucial M4 128gb SSD
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16820148442

Hitachi Deskstar 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB cache SATAII
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16822145304

As I said, the SSD is large enough to fit the games I will be playing the most, so RAID0 will not affect that. I have never used RAID before, so this concept is new to me. Advice?

Oh, and did I make a good choice picking the Crucial M4?

 

[ncc74656]

your games should be installed to your SSD. your storage drives should be raid 1 or 5 not raid 0. if you want more performance buy a second 128SSD and put them into raid-0. i have only used intel and ocz SSD's so i dont know much about the crucial but i have not heard any horror stories so that may say something about them.

 

[ares640]

Anyone else have experience with the Crucial M4?

 

[buzznut]

Anyone else have experience with the Crucial M4?

I wouldn't even bother with raid for your data. The M4 as boot drive and application will be plenty fast. Raid 0 is not safe for data, which is why ncc recommended raid 1. If you lose one drive in Raid 0, you'll lose your data. Not safe.

The latest firmware upgrade for the m4 shows as much as 20% faster performance, finally making it faster than the previous crucial C300s that were so popular. So yeah, they are good drives for the price.

Raiding SSD's is pointless as they will no longer be able to do trim function. So performance will degrade over time.

 

[buzznut]

Anandtech article on m4 firmware upgrade:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4712/the-crucial-m4-ssd-update-faster-with-fw0009

 

[ncc74656]

exactly, you should never raid-0 a data storage drive. if you want to raid-0 an os drive thats fine so long as you keep your data elsewhere. I run a raid-0 with 3 SSD's for my C drive, i did this for a few reasons.
1.) speed increase of 200% and 45% respectively by linking 3 drives.
2.) cost, at the time i got intel's 80GB X25 2nd gens for 90 bucks a peice, thus i needed 3 to have a reasonable sized C drive.

trim is turned off however as long as you dont download a torrent or do some other stupid stuff to your SSD's the speed degradation is minimal over the course of a year. every 6 months i have been using linux to wipe the SSD's so as to reset them to factory to increase performance. i do it every 6 months as thats how often i rebuild/flush my liquid cooling system and it makes since to just do both in the same day. i use linux to sector copy from and to my SSD's so i dont need to reinstall my os.

just wanted to point out that its not pointless to raid SSD's but it does take a bit of upkeep.

for you tho i would think a single ssd should be fine, if you need more space then go ahead and raid them but please dont use any raid other than 1, 5, 6, or 0+1, on your data drives.

@buznut my master chief use to say "mind over matter, if you dont mind it wont matter" just made me think of that.

 

[buzznut]

Thats a lot of maintenance for the avg user! HAHA thats too much for me-I'd rather be doing a mod with my free time.


Master chief? Uggh, now you're making me remember the bad old days.

Guess I don't need to tell ya what fubar means.

FC radar tech, 86-91

 

[ncc74656]

my master chief was in high school NJROTC.

i was 19-Kilo m1a1 abrham driver 04-08 ARNG

 

[leandrodafontoura]

In my opinion, you should upgrade to RAID 0. HHDs are safe enough, they will last long time, no need to get paranoid. You MUST have a backup solution regardless of RAID or not, so you have nothing to fear going RAID.

 

[ncc74656]

i see at least 4 customers come in with a dead HD every day. HD's are fairly secure these days but the users are not. i have had 9 WD green platter HD's for 2 years now running 24/7 with out issue. yet i see customers buy WD greens and then come in weeks later with a dead HD. i honestly do not know what some people do or dont do to there drives to make them fail so damn fast but i see a crap load of HD failures every day. I just can not recommend a raid-0 for any system that will be storing real data. only put data you can stand to loose on a raid-0 system as raid-0 effectively doubles your chances of HD failure. it does not add any stress to the drives but you now have to count on 2 drives not failing as opposed to one.

 

[leandrodafontoura]

Thats why there are backups nowadays.

 

[ares640]

Alright, It sounds like what I have now will do just fine. Thank you everyone.

 

[ares640]

Best answer selected by ares640.