This is my first post here and I hate being a leach, but this wasn't answered where I normally hang out.
I'm pretty sure this is gonna work the way I want it to, but I'm asking others just to make sure.
So on my new build I was planning to have 2 Intel 520 120GB SSD's for performance reasons and some HDD's from storage. My original plan was to have one SSD as my OS drive and the other as my games drive, as this is the setup I have always used with Hard Drives since partitioning makes it so that whenever it needs to read a file from both partitions at the same time the speed is halved for both files as we all know, so having 2 separate drives is better. But then I realized some potential in the fact that I am getting two of the same drive. I figured, why don't I RAID 0 the drives and then just partition them so that my games and OS "drives" are still separate but they are on the same array. This way when ever my computer needs to read a file from both partitions at the same time the speed will be halved, (to 550 MB/s but that is just as fast as a single drive would be anyway) but when it is only reading from one drive it will get the full speed correct? Also just to make sure I understand this right, SATA III has a max speed of 6Gb/s but that limit is not for the entire controller, it is just for each port correct? So if I RAID I shouldn't be limited to 6Gb/s total as I have seen benchmarks with RAID's in the 1000MB/s region, right?. I know that advertised speeds aren't always practical and differ for different file types etc., but for the purpose of this post I will use them.
The way I see it it is like this (this is an example for reads but I mean the same thing for writes):
The base speed of each SSD for read is 550MB/s so...
Drives Separate:
Reading from OS drive: 550MB/s
Reading from Games drive: 550MB/s
Reading from both drives: 550MB/s on each
Drives in RAID 0:
Reading from OS drive: 1100MB/s
Reading from Games drive: 1100MB/s
Reading from both partitions: 550MB/s on each
So it seems to me that I would get much more of a benefit by RAID'ing the drives and just partitioning the array instead of keeping the drives separate because when used individually I get double the speed than if they were separate, while when both partitions are accessed, it is still just as good as one drive would be anyway. Am I right on this one?
I know another problem is that I might lose TRIM, but I have heard that the Intel 11.2 RST driver has RAID 0 TRIM support for 7-series chipsets which is what I have. Is this true?