Raid 0 HD v's SSD

[dfour]

I have the money to buy a small sized up to 60 gig SSD but have been looking at reviews and its a lot of money to save 15 or so seconds loading windows as it will be a boot drive.

For the money £120-£140 I can get 2 samsung F3 500 gig (or 2 raptor 10000rpm drives) and raid them which would give me a good boost and much more storage space for games ad stuff and have change.

So where would you put your money ??

[jim]

RAID is a waste of time - the only obvious difference it makes is to increase disk transfer speeds, so unless you regularly move 10GB+ files/folders from one partition to another, you'll never notice the change.

I'd personally get a single F3 (whatever size you need) and save your money for an SSD - if you don't want to buy one now.

[kalniel]

For the money you can get at least 3 500g drives. However RAID doesn't improve performance as much as you'd expect - it's great for servers which do a lot of write operations, but desktops feel a lot faster with SSDs as they respond quicker.

I'd just get a single 1tb disk and spend the money elsewhere, or put it in a pot for when SSDs come down a bit more.

[smargh]

RAID 0 is only useful for Photoshop scratch volumes, or disposable PCs which are solely used for gaming etc where no irreplaceable data needs to be stored. It doubles your chance of losing ALL data if either disk develops even the slightest fault.

Go SSD. You won't regret it.

[Behemoth]

RAID is a waste of time - the only obvious difference it makes is to increase disk transfer speeds, so unless you regularly move 10GB+ files/folders from one partition to another, you'll never notice the change.

I'd personally get a single F3 (whatever size you need) and save your money for an SSD - if you don't want to buy one now.

QFT - Many years ago I got a bee in my bonnett about having a RAID 0 setup as the motherboard I was running at the time had the controller to do it (Abit KR7A Raid) so I went out and bought two identical hard drives (IBM 120GXP's 60 gig a piece) and set about my RAID adventure.

Yes it was pretty quick, yes it was nice to have games load a touch faster. It was lovely shuttling files round from one partition to another. But it was an absolute PITA when things went wrong. One day the RAID array disappeared and I lost everything I had on my drives.

So I went ahead and set it all up again, then a drive failed.

Seeing my point ? RAID 0 on a desktop PC is pointless UNLESS you are dealing with big files all the time.

Like snootyjim has said get any of the SSD drives out there that you can afford and one big SATA drive. So your os goes on the SSD and your Data on the SATA mechanical drive.

Don't forget whatever the setup, you still need a reliable backup system.

RAID is much better suited in a server side operation, the controllers are much better suited to the job for one.

[Terbinator]

We should really get a sticky pointing out the basics of RAID, more so HDD RAID0 vs a single SSD.

[Saracen]

....

So where would you put your money ??

On the HD's, but personally, I'm not a fan of motherboard RAID at all, and certainly not RAID 0.

SSD's are all very well, but for my money, the price premium is WAY too high. I'm not the slightest bit bothered if either Windows or apps boot a bit faster, and the performance gain in the vast majority of my normal usage simply isn't worth the extra cost. If the cost/MB was 2x, 3x or maybe even 5x then perhaps, but at 20x or more, no way.

Of course, lots of people do think it's worth it and if they're happy, well, it's their money. But for me, they're way overpriced to be value for money outside of very specific circumstances on a desktop machine. But dfour .... it's your cash, and your choice.

[ehhhhhhh]

SSD's are all very well, but for my money, the price premium is WAY too high.

I second this...

When I get similar performance as on the pic below, for a reasonable price (with bigger storage) then i will spend my money on them




I think the tech itself is a bit immature so I'll definitely wait(e.g crucial firmware issues, no trim in raid, some incompatibility issues, etc etc)...


On raid0: if you have a good backup plan (which you should have anyways no matter what you use for the system drive) then it's ok.

[dfour]

You pretty much mimic my own thoughs. Raid is nice but it has its problems especially raid 0 and 1+0 uses to many disks to make it viable.

SSD are to expensive and also have there own problems despite there increased speed in certain circumstances. I think I will just buy one or two samsung F3's and be done with it.

Thx everyone

[Saracen]

The performance issue, either with RAID or with SSDs is a tricky one. For a start, a lot depends on what you do with your PC. There's no doubt in my mind that (especially) SSDs have considerable performance benefits. RAID 0 less so, but it can have benefits. That's not to say it always does, and there's a downside, especially if the particular implementation slows down other things. That, of course, is why high end RAID has fairly powerful (relative to what's expected of them) processors (and a chunk of cache memory) ... and a fairly high-end price to go along with them.

Even with SSDs, assessing the impact of performance is tricky. Yes, they benchmark very well in comparison to HDs, which is as we would expect. And yes, they reduce boot times a lot and, in many cases, program load times quite a lot too. And yes, they can make a system feel "snappy" and responsive.

The question is .... how much are we prepared to pay for that? Because what we can quickly and easily quantify is the price you pay for that, and especially, the relative price compared to an HD. For instance, a 64GB SSD costing £113 gives a price per GB of £1.77p. A 640GB HD costing £50 (-ish) gives a cost per GB of a smidge under £0.08p. A bit of simple division puts that at a bit over 22 times the cost per GB. Or to put that another way, one tenth of the capacity for more than double the price.

So the question I ask myself is "Am I prepared to pay more than double the money for a tenth of the capacity", and the answer has to be "Only if the performance (and other) benefits justify it.

That, then, breaks down into :-

- how much do I value system boot time decreases?
- how much do I value faster app loading times?
- how much difference does the "snappiness" of the system make?
- how do I value other benefits of SSDs, like low power draw?
- what about other impacts, like TRIM, or comparative reliability claims?

System boot time? I only do it once a day, and I turn the PC on and go make a cuppa. Do I care if it takes 30 seconds or 3 minutes to boot? No, because it takes me longer than that to make a cuppa.

App load time? Yeah, faster would be nice, and if costs were the same, I'd grab it. But I only load apps a few times a day, so 15 secs rather than 30 secs isn't much of an issue, especially as I'm often doing something else at the time anyway, be it on the phone, browsing the web .... or making another cuppa.

System snappiness? My judgement is that while it affects my perception of system performance, it makes little or no difference to my actual productivity. Would I like it> Yeah. Am I prepared to pay the cost? Nope. But it's a value judgement and we all make those according to our own criteria, all the time. I've spent a lot more on cameras, and lenses than many people .... and a lot less than others. I've spent a lot more than most people on a car, and a lot less than others. I've spent a lot more on shirts than many people, and a lot less than others. We all decide what we're prepared to spend on, according to our own criteria.

So I understand why people rate SSDs highly enough to pay that 22x capacity premium ..... but I don't.


Other factors? Low power consumption is important on a netbook, and depending on how it's used, perhaps on a laptop. But not, in my view, on a desktop. Ditto weight and shock resistance. Reliability is a complex one. Are SSDs more or less reliable than HDs? In may ways, probably more so. But if I stand a 1 in 100 million chance of getting hit by lighting or a 1 in a billion chance of getting hit by an asteroid, do I lie awake at night worrying about the increased chance of getting fried by lightning?

HDs may be less reliable, but my experience tells me they are pretty reliable these days. None the less, I take stringent measures to back up anything I can't afford to lose, so either an SSD or HD going down is a pain, and a cost. And an SSD failing is likely to cost a lot more, due to price. So even if they're a bit more reliable, the impact if they fail, financially, is bigger.

As I say, I understand why people want and love SSDs. But I do question how many people need the difference they make to performance, certainly in a desktop. So, as far as I'm concerned, they're a luxury, a discretionary item and as such, buying or not is a value judgement purely for the individual.

[Rainmaker]

I'll be grabbing 2x 1TB Samsung F3s from Scan tomorrow to RAID0 in my rig. I've love the speed of an SSD but with 50 meg broadband, 64GB of SSD isn't going to go very far. I was hoping to stretch to Caviar Blacks for the extra cache but tbh I don't think it's going to make that much difference for the price differential.

Any suggestions on stripe size? I'm thinking 128KB? The machine is used mostly for multi-threaded downloading, encoding, serving files to the LAN and running virtual machines, if it makes any difference. TIA.

[peterb]

Well if you are going for RAID0 - don't forget to get another drive or some other backup regime to safeguard your data when one of the RAID devices fail. Hard drives are electro-mechanical devices - so it isn't a question of 'if' they fail - only one of 'when' - and you only need one of the two to fail and its 'bye-bye data'.

[Rainmaker]

Well if you are going for RAID0 - don't forget to get another drive or some other backup regime to safeguard your data when one of the RAID devices fail. Hard drives are electro-mechanical devices - so it isn't a question of 'if' they fail - only one of 'when' - and you only need one of the two to fail and its 'bye-bye data'.

That's not an issue thankfully. My important directories are mirrored in real-time to my FTP server in a German datacentre. I simply need lots of space, decent speed. Backups aren't an issue thankfully.

[1stRaven]

I'll be grabbing 2x 1TB Samsung F3s from Scan tomorrow to RAID0 in my rig. I've love the speed of an SSD but with 50 meg broadband, 64GB of SSD isn't going to go very far. I was hoping to stretch to Caviar Blacks for the extra cache but tbh I don't think it's going to make that much difference for the price differential.

Any suggestions on stripe size? I'm thinking 128KB? The machine is used mostly for multi-threaded downloading, encoding, serving files to the LAN and running virtual machines, if it makes any difference. TIA.

128kb is the stripe I am running. It gives a pretty decent performance.

[Rainmaker]

128kb is the stripe I am running. It gives a pretty decent performance.

[.img]

Sweet Jesus... I need moar drives! Here's my before benchmarks (single 500GB Seagate):



...and then the after (2x 1TB Samsung F3s in Intel RAID0).




Nothing as impressive as yours as I only have two drives, but a significant improvement as you can see. It definitely feels ten times snappier and disc intensive activities are moving along far quicker than before. Now if only my 8600GT hadn't popped 3/4 of the caps off the PCB this afternoon. *sigh* The computer gods don't half like leaving me in need of constant upgrade. LOL

[Urban-UK]

I used to have WD 640 Blacks in raid 0, Yeh it was nice, till the day I turned machine on and it just decided raid array was broken for no reason, drives are fine aswell

I Decided to get a SSD to save the hassle of raid, and I'm so glad I did, SSD has been the single most worthwile pc upgrade I have bought in years, Its made a massive difference to how my pc feels, everything is more or less instant