SSD, RAID and OS?

[monki32]

Hey guys,

Going to be installing windows 7 on a new system soon and here's the dilemma.

I want to use two small SSD's (SATA III, probably in the 450Mb/s read speed range)in raid 0 to get some very high read and write speeds. Would be good if some well informed people could answer these questions for me...

Should I get a RAID card to improve the speed and control(mobo will have RAID)?
How will it effect boot times if the OS is on the drives?

Any extra advice is welcome

cheers
simon

 

[popatim]

Boot time, from power-on, will actually increase using raid due to the extra time the raid bios needs to load and then to synchronize/initialize the drives.

Raid card will do little to improve performance over the motherbd raid, depending on the raid controllers being used of course.

Often its better to get 1 larger drive than to raid two smaller drives. You get easier backup and restores for starters as many programs can't restore back to a raid 0. And backups are critical with raid0 as you now have 1 drive with twice the failure rate. If either drive craps out then all the data is lost. If you are thinking of an AMD build, I don't beleive their raid drivers will pass the TRIM command thru to the SSD's. This may cause your ssd's to loose performance over time. Intel does pass the Trim command so no worries there.