Help with purchasing SSD's. RAID (maybe).

[starkiller29]

Hi I plan on upgrading my 500 gig HDD to something better and faster. Clearly the thing to buy is an SSD and for around 500$ and I see three viable options.

Option 1: Buy 5 100 gig SSDs' priced around 100 dollors each, (Example http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227921 ) and setting them up in RAID-0.

Option 2: Buy 2 256 SSDs' (Example http://www.frys.com/product/7395124?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG ).

Option 3: Just buy 1 SSD. (Example http://www.frys.com/product/7395134?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG )

What I want to know is which one would be fastest. Any useful suggestions are welcome, and please inform me of anything I'm forgetting.

Thank You.

P.S. If you have an idea of a better product than the examples please inform me, and please recommend a RAID card. Also would keeping my old Hardrive in the array speed up or slow down?

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Fastest at doing what? Reading data? Writing data? Synthetic benchmarks? Gaming? Professional work?

Typically a large capacity ssd performs a little better than a small capacity ssd.

Currently the performance, reliability, and consumer ssd sales leader is the Samsung 840 Pro.

Modern 3rd generation solid state drives form a very tight performance cluster. A consumer normally would not notice any performance difference during ordinary use. A consumer would have to run synthetic benchmarks that grossly exaggerate the minor performance differences in order to measure them

I maintain the ssd database listed in the sticky at the very top of this forum section. Here is the link:

http://www.johnnylucky.org/data-storage/ssd-database.html

Scroll down to the brands and models you are interested in and follow the links to the technical reviews.

 

[starkiller29]

Fastest at doing what? Reading data? Writing data? Synthetic benchmarks? Gaming? Professional work?

Heavy gaming, light to medium photo and video editing, and animation rendering(Blender, Maya, Cad .etc).

 

[starkiller29]

After looking at your page I've decided that whatever I do I'll be getting SSDs' from the 840 Pro series.

 

[kuq2Wr]

Option 2 for me. SlickDeals recently had a 840 Pro 256GB SSD for ~$200. Sign-up, or keep tabs on these type of websites for deals. Being patient helps.

 

[mad-max79]

Option 3 because RAID are always a source of trouble and the 512 840 Pro is really fast, an awesome drive.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

For gaming just about any modern 3rd generation solid state drive will do. For photo, video, and film editing as well as animation rendering a solid state drive that is not equipped with a SandForce controller is preferred. The reason for that is that ssd's with SandForce controllers were designed to work extremely well with data that could be compressed. Those ssd's did not do as well with data that could not be compressed. With photos, video, film, and animation rendering you'll be working with data that can't be compressed or compressed just a little bit.

BTW - Are you using a scratch disk? Have you considered using a ramdisk?

 

[Harby3]

FYI The crucial 960gb SSD is now selling at $599.