2 cheap SSD's in raid or one expensive

Thar

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Mar 31, 2006
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Looking at buying a new comp, again. Always have to have a new one it seems. Put an 80 gig SSD in my old one when I built it a couple years ago. Has worked nicely but not much room for anything other then the OS and a game.

Trying to decide if 120 would be enough or should I spring for 240. The price jump is so high. Then there is the question of speed. Get the fastest at the given capacity or ... then it hit me.

Even the slowest cheapest 120 if you bought 2 and set them up in raid 0 would probably saturate the current bus. So why not 2 of the cheapest (while still being reliable) SSD's and put them in raid. I'd have my 240 gigs and the speed for less then a single 200 + drive.

So what does anything think?
2 x Corsair Force Series 3. The question is do they easily and reliably work in a raid setup.
 

billybobser

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Aug 25, 2011
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Afaik (no expert btw)

Raid setups with SSD's lack TRIM, meaning you are left totally at the mercy of SSD's own chosen garbage collection for performance.

So if you were going the raid route, you'll have to check that the ssd's garbage collection kicks in sooner. (though this kind of info isn't well documented on manufacturer specs)
 
There are many options to go with and it will come down to what you want vs what you can afford. There are a wide variety of sizes for the SSD'S from 40/50gb all the way up to 900's. There does seem to be a sweet spot I feel and that is the 240gb ssd , it's large enough for the OS and several programs and games and fast enough to give you good performance. You are able to retain trim vs loosing it in a raid set up and with ssd's trim is going to extend the life of your ssd.
Of course there are some very interesting new products in the SSD market and one of them is the RevoDrive from OCZ , which puts a ssd on a pcb and you plug it into a pci-e slot. I have been using the RevoDrives for some time now and they do work and work well , they bypass the sata connection and are directly using the bandwidth of the pci-e interface. They are bootable and very fast and not cheap. Intel has released plans to also start making pci-e drives to be released early 2012. Another interesting offering from OCZ is the Hybrid drive which is a 100gb ssd and a 1tb hdd together on a pci-e board , it's also bootable. So there you have it , so many choices.
 

Skippy27

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Because RAID is not just about redundancy and data integrity, but about input/output performance as well. RAID 0 is still multiple drives being served as one logical unit for speed, it just isnt for the data integrity of it.
 
Chief

Interestingly, you are correct about what it is an acronym for now. When it started, however, the 'I' stood for "inexpensive." The idea was to use inexpensive, less-reliable drives to build a more-reliable structure. It's the only term that I know of that has changed in this way.