mSata and HDD raid 0 -can it be done?

[varun12]

Hello,

Just ordered mSata Crucial mx200 500gb
and already have a 1tb HDD in my laptop. Alienware M14 - 2014 model.

Is it possible to configure half of my 1 tb hdd and mSata 500gb to work in Raid 0 config?
to speed things up ?

Will it be reliable?

If not, is it possible to move just Win 10 to mSata and use 1 tb as storage?
Also, I made a "recovery media" on a usb drive using Alienware respawn software. Does that contain Win 10 and important drivers on it? and I can simply use that to install Win 10 and drivers on mSata as a "clean installation" and then format 1tb hdd and use it just for data holding purposes?


TIA

 

[USAFRet]

Oh good grief do not do that.

RAID 0 between an SSD and HDD drags the performance of the SSD down to HDD speed.

Do not do this.

 

[geofelt]

You should be able to clone your windows hard drive to the ssd.
I know Samsung and Intel have such utilities that are free, but I do not know about Crucial.
When done, you can use your hard drive as added storage.
You may need to disable secure boot from the bios which only lets windows boot on the original install device.
A ssd for windows will be magical performance on a laptop.

As to raid-0, do not even think about it.
And, it likely will not work at all with disparate devices.

Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential overlapped manner.

Here is a study using ssd devices in raid-0.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html
Spoiler... no benefit at all.

 

[varun12]

You should be able to clone your windows hard drive to the ssd.
I know Samsung and Intel have such utilities that are free, but I do not know about Crucial.
When done, you can use your hard drive as added storage.
You may need to disable secure boot from the bios which only lets windows boot on the original install device.
A ssd for windows will be magical performance on a laptop.

As to raid-0, do not even think about it.
And, it likely will not work at all with disparate devices.

Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential overlapped manner.

Here is a study using ssd devices in raid-0.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html
Spoiler... no benefit at all.

Ok, I won't do raid-0 then

I already have mSata boot caching but that drive is 80gb. So my boot according to startup manager takes 17.2 seconds which is a lie because for the computer to be operational it takes way longer.

To be honest my laptop has been fast just ran out of space so updating HDD- first I thought I'd get 1tb ssd and 500gb sata but then cancelled the 1tb ssd and just got mSata.

Crucial comes with Arconian -hopefully it'll let me install windows on mSata and then delete all data from 1tb storage. I'll be set.

Thanks