Am I going to see a Huge difference in performance from SSDs in RAID??

[SecretCobraz]

So RAID is an option for systems I have heard thrown around quite a bit, with both Pros and Cons.

The Budget I have currently for my system gives me about $200 for Storage, and I already own a 1TB Black caviar, so I figured I would get a good SSD.

What I am looking at right now is either a single Corsair Force Series GT 120GB, or Dual 60GB SSDs of the same brand in RAID 0. Note: this would be the main boot drive. Both Options are within my price range with the 120GB being slight discounted on newegg at the time of writing.

I understand there a a few problems with using a RAID Config, one of the being the inability to update firmware, and certain features like TRIM command being unavailable which is supposed to protect SSDs from performance degradation.

Even though failure rates for SSD are famously low, you are basically doubling what little chance of failure exists.

I can afford both set-ups and there may be other trade offs but what I want to know is if the Performance Boost from using 2 SSDs in RAID 0 over a single SSD outweighs potential problems RAID may cause.

60GB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233193
120GB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233191

Since Controllers may be an issue for some, I am planning on an Asus Maximus Extreme-Z, and I believe it is using a Marvell PCIe 9182 controller.
http://usa.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/Maximus_IV_ExtremeZ/

EDIT: I might also stick with the Single 120GB and add another for RAID 0, using one of my extra HDDs to "Float" the Data.

 

[geofelt]

I have done that with two Intel X25-M 80gb drives. I added a second in raid-0, primarily to get a larger single image "C" drive.
Synthetic benchmarks did show up well, but I noticed no difference in everyday usage. I subsequently installed a single 160gb drive and performance was also the same, or even better.
It turns out that larger drives have more nand chitps that they can access in parallel. Sort of an internal raid-0.

But the real benefit of a SSD is not the sequential data transfer, but the random i/o time. That is what the OS does mostly.

-------bottom line--------------
buy the single larger drive.

 

[SecretCobraz]

Best answer selected by SecretCobraz.

 

[robedm]

If I was in your position and looking to do a RAID-0 or a single 120GB I would go with the RAID. If your budget allows two 120GB that would be a waist; think about it like this, if you have a single 120gb and it fails you'll be left replacing it and starting over again, same goes for the 60GB but if you have 2 60GB in RAID-0 and 1 fails you still need to rebuild the RAID but you'll only need to replace 1 60GB SSD vs a more expensive 120GB Plus the RAID-0 will certainly give you a consistent 30-40% increase in performance which will help you cope with the let down you're going to experience when you run some speed tests and learn that the advertised speeds are over twice the speed of real world tests (this is because the programs they speed test with use a high compression). You'll need to take some things into consideration. What is drive being used for? If use is for O.S, What is the current size of the O.S. and programs you're currently using? Remember that you'll need to keep your SSD at less than 80% filled so 2 60GB in Raid-0 = 120GB or roughly 110GB formatted. Hope this helps!